I turned the tuner and an immensely cheery voice was halfway through telling us about how an entire family of five had just been wiped out in an automobile accident. I tuned again: ‘Get your children ULTRA-DEATH this Christmas, the great new family game; draw a card, throw the dice — and you might get to choose euthanasia for your favourite aunt…’; I tuned again and a voice told me that if my journey wasn’t essential, not to start it as it was going to snow shortly. He evidently needed either a new set of glasses or windows in his studio. I turned off the radio and lit a cigarette. What should have been a four and a half hour run to Boston was going to take a lot longer, and at this rate, I would be lucky to get there this side of midnight.
I could have used Intercontinental’s own computer to prise the secrets out of my little plastic friend in my pocket, but I had a feeling right now that staying away from the offices would be the best thing for my health. I’d telephoned Martha, my secretary, and told her I wasn’t feeling too hot and was going to take a few days’ rest. Having seen Sumpy come into the office to collect me on a couple of occasions, Martha was discreet enough not to ask whether I’d be contactable at home, and merely wished me a quick recovery. I wondered about Martha; about whether she knew who her real employers were. She was a smart girl, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find she was a Fifeshire operative as well. If she was she’d covered her tracks well; since she happened to be extremely attractive, the idea of attempting to get to know her better in the not-too-distant future appealed to me as a pleasant diversion.
The traffic ahead came to an abrupt halt, and I pressed the brake pedal and released it several times in rapid succession to prevent the wheels locking up, and stopped. I thought hard about the layout of the campus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I’d spent only a few weeks there during my computer training and in that time had been shown most of the billions of dollars’ worth of equipment that were laid on for the purpose of educating the brightest echelons of America’s student scientists in the technical ways of the world. I hoped no one was going to mind a small part of that equipment being put to practical use for a short while.
The weather got worse and the road got longer, and I camped the night on the floor of the Interchange 70 Howard Johnson Motel, in the company of most of the population of the North Eastern seaboard; they all appeared to be commercial travellers with urgent nine o’clock appointments in the furthermost points of the continent, men to whom earnest conversation about inventory control on gearboxes, vacuum packing of anglepoise lamps, weekly call lists and mileage rationalisation were evidently more important than sleep.
In the morning I felt foul, and didn’t feel like joining the long queue to the washroom. I went outside to start clearing the snow and ice from my car windows. The storm had been and gone, and left behind it a glorious morning of glistening white ground and stark deep-blue sky basking in the gentle glow of the winter-weak sun. The roads were clear, though wet with the melted snow, and I covered the remaining miles into Boston in time to join in the rush-hour traffic.
I drove down Mass Avenue, over the Harvard Bridge, and then turned right behind the main body of the Institute buildings. I parked the car in an open lot, and walked down to the stunningly graceful embankment, Memorial Drive.
Bearded, tieless, greasy-faced from not having washed this morning, jacket and trousers crumpled, and with the white pallor of a sleepless night, I felt I should easily pass as a post-graduate student.
I crossed over and walked along by the Charles River, and looked over the far side at Boston, with the gold dome of the State House and the John Hancock Tower rising from the snow-covered ground. A horde of 45-year-old joggers nearly mowed me down as I turned to start walking again.
The air was cold and the tiny warmth of the sun felt good. My shoes rapidly turned to pulp in the slush, and I cursed myself for not having any boots.
The Computer Science rooms would, I knew, be busy, but there was an IBM 370 in the Chemistry block that I remembered being told was rarely used, and I made my way to it. The whole place seemed to have shrunk since my first visit, the way places always seem to.
I reached the building and went straight in; a security man was standing in the entrance, which was a new addition since I’d been there.
‘I’m going up to the 370.’
‘You with the seminar?’
I nodded that I was.
‘Up the stairs, second on the right.’
I thanked him, cursing to myself that there was a seminar, walked up and went in through the door. It was a familiar layout of two rooms adjoining, with a large amount of window space in between. Through the window was the operator in the temperature-controlled room where a plethora of shiny blue boxes with winking lights and clumps of wires concealed something considerably more intelligent than the old cash registers upon which Watson founded his International Business Machines.
In the room I was in, the VDU room, were the visual display telescreens, the plotters, the card readers and the printers. There was also a large group of students, ranging from the younger ones in their cords or jeans, track-suit tops or faded jerseys, and mandatory Adidas shoes, to older ones in herringbone sports jackets and flannel trousers. Over half the entire group wore thick rimless glasses; the age group spanned 19 to 50. A tall thin man, with a sallow face and zipped up corduroy jacket, was expounding on some figures on a diagram on one of the visual display screens in the centre of the room. He stopped and looked at me almost apologetically when I walked in. ‘Oh — er — are you wanting to run a program?’
‘Well, I was — but I can wait.’
‘Not the Zee Beta Assignment is it?’
‘Er — no!’
‘Traffic control?’
‘No — it’s a new one I’m working out — part of my term paper.’
He peered at me. ‘You don’t look familiar.’
I wasn’t surprised. Fortunately I remembered some names from my previous visit. ‘Actually I’m up from Princeton. I’m on a special course under Dr Yass.’ I hoped to hell Dr Yass hadn’t been hit by a bus during the couple of months since he’d escorted me around Princeton for a morning. I was aware of nineteen of the other twenty faces in the room staring at me. The twentieth was busy plucking the hairs out of his head, one by one. Enlightenment glowed in the lecturer’s face; yet again the ancient art of name-dropping had worked.
‘Go right ahead, if it’s not going to take too long. I’ll be taking a while yet. It’ll be good for these students here to watch.’
My already overstretched nerves began jangling badly; blind panic was only inches away. My previous experience of actually running computers was very minimal indeed. The knowledge that I had acquired was suitable only for talking, in a seemingly knowledgeable manner, about such machines — not for operating them. I knew just about enough, given time and a fair wind, to perform the most elementary of operations. Given the current climate of this room, even if I could escape the attention of the operator there was no way I was going to achieve anything by plugging my chip into this computer, except perhaps to provide a good few days’ employment for an IBM repair team. Furthermore, in the unlikely event of my succeeding in obtaining any satisfactory results, I wouldn’t have been over-anxious for the secrets of the chip to be revealed to twenty-one strangers; there were other people, not a million miles from this room, who, had they been aware of my predicament, I am pretty damn sure would have shared that sentiment.