The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  She stopped, her mouth dry, and took a long drink of water. The men in the audience took the opportunity to gaze at her breasts as she raised her right arm.

  ‘In taking the hint that error is central in some way to having successful ideas, I have concentrated on creating a program that makes mistakes in very large numbers. Unlike evolution, we have not, until the development of NEMO, created a space for error in our attempt to write computer programs. On the contrary, we have tried to eliminate it, regarded it as a sign of incompetence. We have built a rational creature and we wonder why computers are so inflexible. We have tried to make everything one hundred per cent useful. Nature never does this. We can ask ourselves why and answer by pointing to the success of the mechanism of evolution: if it were not necessary for error to be omnipresent it would not be everywhere. We may never fully know how nature makes error work for it, but that need not be a problem as long as we can learn to make error work for us. If NEMO processed information at the same speed as my neighbour’s six-year-old son in trying to solve the problem of the apple it would probably find it quicker to wait for it to drop off the tree. But, given the potential speed and size of computer memory, we can afford to be much cruder in developing a system of this kind than if we tried to imitate the mysterious short cuts and fuzzy logic of the human brain.

  ‘NEMO allows us to produce numerous reasonably sensible, but usually wrong, hypotheses. NEMO does not think, but it imitates thinking in a way that may help us unite the capacity of the computer to remember everything with the human capacity for turning what it remembers into something new.’ She looked down at her notes in order to create a pause before the climax, one that she was sure would not only amaze the room, but also seal the contract with Hitachi. With a thrill of anticipation she began.

  ‘The biggest killer of adults over the age of forty in the West is heart disease. If cardiovascular diseases were infectious – every year they kill two hundred thousand people in the UK alone – we would now be living during the worst ongoing plague since the Black Death. I will shortly be introducing you to Professor David Turner, Research and Development Lead at North Thames Region. We have been working with Professor Turner on an experiment using NEMO to search a huge medical database which links medical files from twenty different universities around the world. Vast numbers of files have been scanned optically into these databases. Some of them go back over a hundred and fifty years. In other words, many of these documents will not have been read by any person living today. Professor Turner,’ she nodded at a grumpy-looking middle-aged man in the front row who, at this admiring glance, lit up like a reflective road sign caught in a headlight, ‘who has for many years championed the use of computers in his research, and is a gifted programmer himself, provided us with invaluable information in devising ways in which to teach NEMO about cardiovascular disease.’ This praise for Turner was a hefty ex-aggeration and the goblin of truth in Anne’s soul heckled and jeered; it was both noted and ignored.

  ‘At any rate, we had gradually been giving NEMO more and more information about heart disease while it was also being taught more information about the world in general. Including, as it happened, information about the fauna of South America. One of the things it learnt was the way in which leeches are able to feed off animal blood by secreting an enzyme to thin the blood of its victims so that it can be more readily absorbed. Having been programmed to search the medical files using such knowledge as we had been able to provide, NEMO astonished us by unearthing a scientific paper on the giant Amazonian leech written by Filippo de Filippi. I’ll ask Professor Turner to go into the details of the implications of what NEMO found in a moment, but in his view there is the potential in the discovery of the way in which the enzymes from this animal act on human blood to lead to the development of a new breed of drugs. These drugs could be as important in the treatment of cardiovascular disease as the discovery of penicillin to the treatment of infectious disease.’ She looked around the hall at her audience and felt the rapt attention. For the first time she understood what it meant to have people in the palm of your hand. ‘As far as we know, no one had read this paper on the unusual qualities of the secretions of the giant Amazonian leech since the paper was submitted to the archive from which it was retrieved by NEMO.’ She paused and looked out at the audience. ‘Filippo de Filippi’s paper was written in 1846.’

  The silence deepened.

  ‘Nothing,’ she continued, in an ecstasy of hidden pleasure, ‘could more dramatically illustrate the problem of buried or hidden knowledge than the discovery I’ve outlined here. Nothing can illustrate more dramatically the benefits of solving that problem. Thank you for your attention. I will now hand you over to Professor Turner.’

  Half an hour later the guests mingled in the Wife of Bath’s banqueting and reception room, warm white wine in one hand, and sandwiches that managed to be both limp and stale at the edges in the other. Steven Grlscz watched Anne Levels carefully, making sure not to be seen by her. He had considered introducing himself there and then, but the police investigation into Maria’s disappearance was too much on his mind. It was best to leave well alone until there was a resolution. He watched as she was buttonholed by a silver-haired, sardonic-looking man in his sixties with silver hair, the CEO of Machine Intelligence, Andrew O’Connor. ‘Very well done, Anne. You excelled yourself. Pity about the dysphasia business. An uncreative error if I may say so.’

  But Grlscz was not the only one watching her. Across the room Martin Beck was wondering whether his attempt to make a breakthrough in his frustrating courtship of Anne by showing an interest in her work (and neglecting his own as a teacher by claiming to be ill in bed) had deepened her affection for him. He watched as Anne turned away from O’Connor and came towards him, smiling. It was a warm smile, a pleased-to-see-you-and-thank-you-for-coming smile. But it was devoid of what Martin wanted to see: longing.

  In the corner of the room George Winnicott was pretending to listen to someone who said he was a soil scientist working on preventing the Leaning Tower of Pisa from falling down. What he was actually doing was thinking about El3.

  Alice Winnicott and Dr White

  Many would deride the assertion that a failing economy and a failing marriage are similar problems. It is, of course, absurd. They are the same problem. The difference is merely one of scale.

  Louis Bris, The Wisdom of Crocodiles

  Alice Winnicott was thirty-eight, blond and tired. Her shape, ill-defined by her clothes at hip and bust, also gave the impression of habitual fatigue. Her tiredness was not temporary, not the product of a bad night, or too much work. Over the years, the superficial weariness of too much children business, shopping business, washing business, a too demanding job, had seeped into her inner life. She was almost spent. Her desires had suffered a terrible depletion. The pupils at her school, where she was a senior teacher, were afraid of her. No one wanted to go and see Mrs Winnicott in her office. But her own children were not afraid. At home she seemed both resentful and becalmed: the power she wielded so readily in school seemed to desert her as soon as she walked through the door. Her relationship with them was now confined to having remembered to buy the correct kind of onion-free beefburger that would forestall the disappointed whimper of her son at tea-time, and the avoidance of yet another pointless spat with her fourteen-year-old daughter. In her rare periods of reflection she thought that she was reducing to someone who merely ran things – but she was mistaken about this. Something much deeper had gone wrong with Alice Winnicott. Her hair had gone wrong. It had been slightly untidy for nearly ten years. One minute’s more attention to her hair a day would have made all the difference. But she did not have a minute.

  ‘I don’t think going tonight is a good idea.’

  ‘My head hurts whatever I do, so I might as well do something useful.’

  There was a pause as she looked at the livid bruise on her husband’s forehead. She was not so much unsympathetic to his pain as resentf
ul of it, as if it were another affront. What she liked about these resentments, though this was not consciously acknowledged, was how plausible any denial could be about bearing them. These were things that could not be resented. Any accusation to the contrary could easily be denied as absurd. On the other hand, she felt so many of these satisfying grudges that she also felt profoundly unreasonable. As a result she was ashamed of herself all the time because she felt angry with him all the time, and yet there was nothing to pin on him. Without acknowledging anything openly to herself, she was in a continuous state of shame and anger. Had anyone pointed this out to her she would have become more ashamed and even angrier. Because it was just not true.

  ‘I still don’t see why you want to come to the parents’ evening tonight. It’s only two days since you were knocked unconscious and you’ve just come back from a long day in Canterbury. After all, I am the head of a department at the school – if you have any questions when I come back I can just ask them the next day. I don’t see what you coming could possibly achieve.’

  He did not say anything for a moment. His silences were eloquent rebukes to her testiness. But, still, she was not testy and he was not silently antagonistic. None of this was happening.

  ‘I think it’s important to go because you teach at the same school. It can’t be easy for her sometimes. It doesn’t seem fair to have to ask for more information about her. I get the impression she thinks she’s being watched all the time as it is.’

  ‘Of course she isn’t being watched.’

  ‘All the same,’ he said, and went back to his reading.

  Although he had insisted on going to the parents’ evening, Winnicott felt sick by the time they entered the large gymnasium. It was not, however, possible to reveal to her that he was feeling unwell.

  The floor space contained about fifteen tables, and behind them sat the teachers with their handwritten signs: PHYSICS, GEOGRAPHY, FRENCH. He had seen this unremarkable identifier of subject teachers many times before but a strange, distant sensation in his head gave the sight a bizarre aspect, as if he were watching an exhibition of a surreal conceptual tableau. The essence of ECONOMICS was embodied by a gangly man with greasy hair and spots wearing a brown suit, the soul of HISTORY by a jolly woman with a tight perm that might itself have formed part of an exhibition on the fashions of 1974, the incarnation of ART was an empty seat and a queue of indignant men and women.

  They were late, and not only were all the tables occupied but there were queues everywhere. One desk, however, was free. Sitting behind it was a man in his late twenties he had not met before, and whose desk bore the sign ENGLISH written in Gothic script so ornate it was practically indecipherable. A surge of nausea swept through Winnicott, too intense to ignore.

  ‘Let’s sit down,’ he said. ‘My head hurts.’

  ‘I told you not to come.’

  ‘I feel much better now that you’ve reminded me.’ The English teacher looked up. Had Winnicott been feeling better he would have seen the animosity between his wife and the good-looking young man, who stood up, held out his hand and introduced himself to Winnicott, smiling coolly at Alice by way of minimal acknowledgement. ‘Martin Beck,’ he said and sat down again, placing his finger in his mark book and following the list of names down to Sarah Winnicott.

  He began talking, but the favourable remarks drifted as the buzzing in Winnicott’s head grew louder and louder.

  As he went through the motions of qualified approval, it occurred to Beck for the first time that Alice was once, and could still have been, not just an attractive, but even an alluring woman. The clothes she wore were well made and even fashionable up to a point, but they had been worn too often. There were no missing buttons or frayed edges, nor were they creased. They were just exhausted. When he finished going through his judgement, Beck shut his mark book with a dismissive finality.

  ‘She seems to be doing fine. Is there anything you want to tell me? She doesn’t say much.’

  ‘She likes to be asked things,’ Alice replied. ‘She’s a bit of a show-off under it all, really. It just needs bringing out.’

  Beck noted the rebuke, but as he was about to respond he could see that Winnicott had gone white. ‘Are you all right, Mr Winnicott?’

  ‘Oh . . . I’ve had a bit of a knock on the head,’ he said, pleasantly dismissive. Then he collapsed.

  Alice gasped with alarm and knelt beside him. Winnicott spoke before he became unconscious, but so softly that only she and Martin Beck could hear his voice. Except that it was not his voice.

  The next morning Martin Beck drove, slightly late, into the car park of Mabey’s Grammar School for Girls. One of the sixth form was about to take the last parking space reserved for teachers. He noted mournfully that she was driving a car considerably better than his own. He wound down the window. Hers slid smoothly downwards as she pressed the electric switch on the dash.

  ‘The expression “sling your hook” comes to mind,’ he said pleasantly. A large girl, she sighed with the resignation of a particularly put-upon Buddha and backed out. Beck parked, locked the door and headed towards the main building. The school was surrounded on three sides by mature trees, which in the autumn offered a striking display of reds, golds and browns of astonishing variety. The school geographer claimed this autumnal technicolor was virtually unique in Europe and was caused by the unusual combination of rich topsoil and barren, flinty subsoil. Another more recent side-effect was that because of global warming there were still some leaves on the trees in January.

  As he walked into the foyer he saw Alice Winnicott looking down at him from the balcony next to her first-floor office as if she had been waiting for his arrival. Then he heard the sentence that makes the hearts of underlings everywhere sink with disquiet and apprehension. ‘Mr Beck, I wonder if I might have a word.’

  As he walked up the stairs to her office he wondered why the ‘word’ people wanted to have with you was never ‘Here’s more money,’ or, ‘I just want to say what a privilege it is to work with a man of your intellectual distinction.’ It was always doom of some kind: at best, one of the parents had complained, at worst, he had overheard the Head using the same phrase as the victim had been ushered out of the staff room to hear that her husband had been killed in a car crash.

  He sat down in her office and waited, growing less nervous as she failed with uncharacteristic awkwardness to come to the point. ‘How’s your husband?’ he said at last.

  She smiled wanly. ‘Actually, that was what I wanted to talk to you about. To explain.’

  ‘Explain?’ He was puzzled by her unease.

  ‘My husband had been involved in an accident at work. He’d been knocked unconscious. I told him not to come to the parents’ evening but . . .’ She sensed Beck’s puzzlement and was offended. It was George’s fault. He had put her in this position. ‘I just want to ask you . . . what he said just before he lost consciousness.’ This was agony for her, he thought, feeling slightly sorry for her but also enjoying her intense discomfort. ‘I’d rather . . . I’d prefer it if you said nothing to the other teachers. You know what people are like.’

  He said nothing for a moment then nodded as if he knew only too well what they were like. ‘As it happens, I didn’t really catch what he said anyway. Something about a secret, that’s all. He was obviously very unwell – distraught. I know what’s that like. I was in a car accident when I was a teenager. I was rambling for hours after. Anyway, I didn’t really hear what he said.’ He shrugged to indicate there was nothing for him to be discreet about. ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘He seems fine now but he’s having another X-ray just to be on the safe side. He went back to work too soon.’

  Now that she realised Beck had barely registered the nonsense that George had spoken in that voice she felt irritated. She had been forced to make up to someone she disliked and over whom she had to exercise authority, and all for no reason. She might even have made things worse. It might be as well to look for a
n opportunity to remind Beck that she was not someone to be taken advantage of.

  Winnicott was playing host in his office to the seven policemen who were responsible for the collating and safekeeping of documents at the FS. They had been moaning for ten minutes about the lawyers and the accountants, their arrogance, their smugness and their general uselessness. As there was no sign of their irritation with the FS blowing itself out, he decided it was time to get down to business.

  ‘Of course you’re curious to know why I’ve asked you to come and see me today. I want you to be frank. And I can assure you that nothing you say will go beyond this room.’ He did not expect them to believe this, and in their position he would certainly have waited until he knew more about him before offering any opinion that might rebound later. However, he felt that McCarthy might be testing him and he had no intention of being caught off-guard if he could avoid it. One of them might be usefully indiscreet.

  ‘In what way do you want us to be frank, sir?’ said Stowell, a plump, bullet-headed, twenty-year man with close-cropped hair and an Open University degree in sociology.

  ‘Let me begin by being straightforward with you myself, then. It’s been put to me that if the FS has a weakness, it’s in the matter of investigation. I have no opinion. It has been put to me and I do not expect to hear any rumours that this is what I think emerging from this meeting. Is that clear?’

  He felt satisfied that the pointlessly stern warning would create the impression he was not the type to ingratiate himself, while the implication that their skills were being under-used would obviously please them. He was tough. He was on their side. It did not, in fact, matter to him whether they repeated what he had said or not. If the accountants and lawyers were to fear changes to come it would be no bad thing. ‘So, the floor is yours.’