Outside the cellar wooden stairs led up to a swing door covered with green baize which was held in place by a pattern of brass studs. Beyond this was a hail floored with polished wood from which another staircase, vast and swirling, rose to a remote plastered ceiling. Nowhere was there a carpet or one stick of furniture. Masked men moved about with the rush of crisis, carrying ammunition boxes and files of papers. The fat man led Humayan down a wide passage to a door guarded by a masked sentry. The two ectoplasmic faces whispered together in the shadows, then the sentry knocked a deliberate pattern of raps on the door and let them through.
This was a moderate-sized room with a large table in the middle. A woman and four men sat at the table; two of the men were white; none of them wore masks. This sudden appearance of the real faces of his oppressors instead of the ghost-faces of nylon and the devil faces of cloth gave Humayan a momentary pulse of courage. A radio was playing softly in one corner of the room, and a small green man was hunched over it. Apart from him the Council looked relaxed and businesslike.
“This laddie,” said the fat man, “spoke with the traitor before he left. Say what happened, mister.”
Humayan told them all he thought it was necessary for them to know. He could not read their faces, but was suddenly struck by the notion that they could not read his: each was alien to the other. The woman asked all the questions.
“He’d say that anyway, Leary,” said one of the white men.
“Aye, but it has a likely sound,” said one of the Greens. “Anything at all there, Alan?”
The man by the wireless waved a negative hand.
“If he’d got through to them, they’d be moving by now,” said the woman.
“He might hide out first and then give them the tip anonymous,” said a green man.
“He would not do that,” said Humayan.
They all looked at him.
“He told me he is finished with Mr. Mann. He told me the Greens are his people.”
One of the green men laughed.
“Thanks, Jock,” said someone. “You can take him away now.”
The big hand gripped Humayan’s shoulder and flicked him round.
“No!” said Humayan, twisting his neck. “I have something much more important …”
“Ye do what the Council tells ye,” said the fat man, whisking him towards the door.
“The big computer at the RRB,” shouted Humayan as the door swung open.
“Jock!” said the woman’s voice. The grip loosened. He was allowed to slink back.
“Well?” said the woman. “We are busy. Be quick.”
Humayan stood upright and swelled his chest a little.
“My name is P. P. Humayan,” he said. “I am the best medical statistician in the world. Easily the best. I was brought to England by the RRB, because of an accidental discovery I had made about the hereditability of the green gene. They hoped to use my work to extrapolate the population growths of the two races on this island. Do you understand?”
Their murmurs were of assent, but not of interest.
“Now,” he said, more loudly, “to be a statistician of my calibre you have to be able to work very closely with computers. This I find easy. I understand computers very well indeed. In my office I had a Telex which allowed me to use the big RRB computer on a time-sharing basis. One day when I was talking to Mr. Mann—you know of him?”
These murmurs were quite different.
“Good, well that morning he told me I had been tying the big computer in knots. This of course was nonsense, just a manner of speaking; something I had been doing, my personal code of information storage, caused a very minor blockage, a little local overloading, in the circuits. You understand?”
“Sure,” said one of the men, “but if you can tangle it up by filing away a few figures, why doesn’t it spend all its time in knots?”
“Oh, the blockage I caused lasted only a few thousandths of a second. The machine then rejected the material, as it was programmed to do. It was also programmed to report the matter, which is how Mr. Mann knew of it. A machine of that type is full of all sorts of safety devices to prevent it getting tied in knots. It has what is called a supervisor circuit to control these safety devices, and also to allot the timing of all the various tasks which come in from different inputs. This supervisor circuit is very complex, it is the heart of the whole machine. I propose to show you how to put a rat into it. An electronic rat.”
“What good will that do?” said the woman. “They will buy themselves a new machine.”
“First,” said Humayan, “that itself would take time. A year or more. Second, I do not propose to make the machine break down. I propose to make it a little unreliable, so that they cease to trust it. At the moment the whole organisation is completely geared to the reliability of the computer. I mention a name of a Celt to Mr. Mann. He taps some keys. Three minutes later he has in his hand the dossier and photograph of that person. Now, just to cause a doubt in his mind whether the dossier is the right one, to force him to check by slow, non-electronic means, that in itself will be a considerable achievement.”
The oratorical vibrations of the last phrase seemed to hang in the dusty curlicues of the ceiling. The man who had laughed before did so again.
“I like it,” he said. “You may not know this, mister, but one of the educational areas absolutely dosed to citizens of Celtic origin is computer technology. Even if they get on to us, the fact that we’ve been trying it out will shake them.”
“Sounds like wishful thinking to me,” said one of the white men. “How the hell are we going to get a Green in, so he’s even allowed to touch a computer. One hell of a screening, they get.”
“That is certainly the first problem,” said Humayan. “But I think I can help you. The woman in charge of the cleaners at the RRB is called Marge, and her sister is a professional prostitute called Selina who works at a house in Snide Street called the Daffodil. Selina told me that her sister is terrified that the RRB might discover what is Selina’s trade, because apparently she would lose her job. So perhaps I can give you a hit of a lever here …”
“But a cleaner, mister,” broke in one of the Greens.
“It is all right,” said Humayan. “You must find me two things: first, the keys that were in my pocket when I was kidnapped. One of these is the key to the Telex in A3, which I believe has access to the supervisor circuit, and is a room not used by anybody who does any serious work. Then you must find me a woman who has no subversive record and is good at mathematics—not brilliant, but just reasonably good. I can remember every number I have ever seen, but I am not asking for that.
“Now, I will tell you what the computer technicians at the RRB will do when things start to go wrong. First there will be a conflict between the engineers and the programmers, about whether there is a machine fault or a programme fault. They will try to settle that by running the programme through an identical machine, but there is only one identical machine in the country, Mr. Mann told me, and that is at the Treasury and very busy. It will take them at least a fortnight to discover that it is not a machine fault. Then they will start looking for a programme fault, a coincidence of numbers which sets in train unintended computations. At this stage we will feed in a series of instructions that appear to point to a man named Tarquin, who used to employ the computer for calculating the odds on complicated bets on horse races. He is Mr. Mann’s ADC, and extra-curricular work such as he has been doing is just the sort of thing that leads to coincidental failures of programmes. I must point out that it is not necessary for these instructions to be fed in at particular times. It is possible to instruct the machine to act in a certain manner whenever a certain series of numbers crops up, say in a pass, and also to reinstruct itself to do the same next time, while destroying the source of the original instruction. For instance, Mr. Mann’s own RRB pass number ends with
the figures eight-three-seven. The machine could be told that whenever it was asked about a number whose last-but-two figure was eight and last figure was seven it should supply instead information about Mr. Mann himself. This would therefore happen on average one time in a hundred. It is a typical, if very simple, coincidence error. The instruction that caused it could, I believe, be made to appear on analysis to have come from a Telex where someone had been fooling around with betting on horses. This is what they will start looking for, and therefore when they find it they will believe that they have now traced the problem to its source. However, other, similar errors will begin to emerge. They will trace them, by similar means. They will build a clock into the machine, and start to try to account for every instruction given it. Even this I believe it will be possible to circumvent. But in the end they will begin to think that perhaps the errors are being deliberately caused. They will trace them to the Telex in A3.”
“And get our girl?”
“Not at once. It happens that the normal occupant of A3 is a rather foolish young man who has a homosexual relationship with the Director of the RRB. Mr. Mann hates him and would be glad of an excuse to break him. I think your cleaner will be able to recognise when that happens and escape, if necessary in such a fashion that it is clear that she was responsible for all the trouble. Not counting the further errors she will be able to leave behind in the instructions of the computer, I would be surprised if the whole process takes less than six months. And it will leave behind it a great aura of distrust. Very few people in the RRB who use the computer truly understand it. Their relationship with it is emotional and mystical. They will never quite trust it again.”
“It still sounds like a fairy-tale to me,” said the sceptical white.
“There must be some feller we could ask,” said a Green. “Even if he’s not up to this feller’s level, he can tell us whether it sounds right.”
“Blind him with science, this guy would,” said the first man. Humayan agreed, but silently. There were unlikely to be a dozen people in England, and all of them Saxon, who could follow the details of what he was proposing to try to do. The room hung silent except for the faint, dotty gushing of the disc-jockey through whose outpouring the message of warning might come. It made a very sinister background.
“The proposal is ideologically sound,” said the woman suddenly. “It is a logical extension of the tactics of urban guerrilla war, to use the system to disrupt the system. This lackey of the system will teach us how, because he knows that if he is lying he will be punished.”
“And we’d only be risking one agent,” said the sceptic.
The man with the tendency to laugh did so.
“We haven’t heard the lackey’s side of the deal,” he said.
“It is irrelevant,” said the woman. She reminded Humayan in an odd way of Kate Glister, a Kate who had never been pretty, never been loved, never been killed. The man laughed again; what had first seemed a sign of humanity was clearly only a mannerism, like a sniff.
“Yeah, no deals,” said the sceptic. “We can get it out of him.”
“You are mistaken,” said Humayan, only a little shrilly. “I am not brave, but what I have to do is very difficult—it will demand all my powers. If I am afraid I cannot think. If I am hurt, perhaps I will never be able to think about it again. I have told you that I can remember every number I have ever seen, and this will be necessary. But if you associate fear and pain with the task perhaps I shall suffer retrograde amnesia.”
“Glib little sod,” said the white man who had not so far spoken.
“Let’s hear his deal,” said the sceptic.
“Our listening to it does not commit us to considering it,” said the woman.
“Oh, I have a very neat little package for you,” said Humayan, relaxing almost into a salesman’s wheedle. “You do not trust me and I do not trust you, yes? So I will not ask for my freedom at once, and I do not propose to start instructing your agent at once—in any case I have at least a week’s thinking to do—I must not conceal from you that the task still presents many difficult and unsolved problems. So first you will demonstrate your good faith by releasing Mr. Zass, and then I will demonstrate mine by teaching your agent how to build an electronic rat. Finally you will let me go, because my real work is important to you, in ways you will never understand. OK?”
“Bollocks,” said the sceptic. “Zass can tell ’em enough about this place for them to work out where we are. And then we won’t have him as a hostage—we’ll just have this wee brown feller. We’ll have the Conciliators out here in twenty-four hours.”
“Mr. Zass is a very honourable man,” said Humayan. “He believes, too, that I tried to save his life at the expense of my own. He will not say anything that is likely to harm me. If you were to release him out of reach of Mr. Mann—perhaps in Ireland?”
“Here we go again,” said the laughing man, sighing through his laugh. “We voted three each way, to shoot him or to let him go, and then we tossed for it.”
“The Council cannot go back on a decision,” said the woman. “It would impugn the reliability of future decisions.”
“Huw won’t like it,” said the sceptic. “He’d set his heart on that firing-squad, the moment he saw that bit of lawn. He should have been running a theatre.”
“Balls to both of you,” said one of the white men. “I hate Celts. You always want to decide everything in terms of ideology or drama.”
“It’s in our bloody blood,” said Alan, looking up from his crouch by the wireless. “Someone else come and listen—it’s that sod of a Saxon who keeps putting on rhythm ’n’ pibroch.”
A shuffle took place, Alan exchanging stations with one of the white men, who crouched patiently over the radio waiting for some signal of doom to penetrate the mushy thud of the discs. Alan was a wiry, intent, cranny-featured Green. He had that cocky look that is often found in members of a suffering race who are not at the moment suffering themselves. He was a survivor.
“I vote we give it a swing,” he said at once. “Look, we can ship the ambassador back on the boat that’s bringing the guns. Pegeen can give him a nice deep sedative, and he’ll wake up in the US Embassy in Dublin, in the ambassador’s bed if we can lay it on …”
The next fortnight turned out to he the happiest Humayan had ever spent in his life. With Mr. Zass’s manly farewell still aching through his fingertips he was settled down in a neat little room on the top floor of the enormous, empty mansion; he was given a dozen pencils and reams of yellowing paper, a bed, a table and a chair. For four days he lost himself in an abstract world, wrestling over the unknown miles with the many-tentacled monster in the RRB basement, till he could almost feel the chill of the air-conditioning that surrounded it and hear the everlasting dull whine of the fans that kept the dust away from its circuits. He had more information to work from than he had expected, for the erratic resources of the guerrilla movement had pilfered a considerable number of RRB documents, from Arts Council subsidies for Eisteddfodau to confirmations of execution orders in Conciliation camps, from the sales of Scotch whisky in Japan to the illegitimacy figures in Llandaff. Each document bore its computer coding at the top and, like the army of ants in the fairy-tale who rescued the princess by each bringing one grain of rice to build the required pyramid, was another tiny grain of fact, and also of insight into the habits of mind of the men who had programmed the monster.
Food came, but sometimes another meal would arrive before Humayan had even looked at the first. One night he did not leave his chair at all, but thought the hours away till light came again, enough for him to see the smear of dawn mist above the lake where the bodies of Dave and Ian and the student lay decomposing. None of that fretted him at all. On the fifth morning he yawned and shivered and sent word that he was ready for his pupil.
Her name was Anna Lewis. She had been chosen because she had at one time
sat through an economics course at the University of Wales, and had been heading for a First before a change in the Celtic Education regulations prevented her from taking a degree in that subject at all. She was a square-shouldered, sturdy little woman, whose black hair was streaked at the temples with grey. Her green face seemed to be all in one plane, with only the sharp small nose projecting from it. Her mouth was small and her teeth tiny and white, but her grey eyes behind heavy spectacles were large and round. She was very intelligent.
Humayan had not of course been able to plot out a complete and infallible course of action. What lay before Anna was a series of branching paths; at every point of fission she had to ask a riddle of the monster, and interpret its riddling answer, and then cajole or trick it into destroying all record of her passage while she groped on along the path the riddles had indicated. The task would have been impossible if Humayan had not already deduced the probable choice at all the nearer branchings and many of the further ones.
But that first morning he had to give up to preliminaries; he had drawn a careful model of a Telex keyboard, and little pictures of all the switches, screens and gadgets she would find around it. She asked the right questions, so in an hour he was able to start explaining the basic principles behind what she was going to have to do. She took on trust what she could not grasp and made sure that she understood what she could. He was able to leave out huge areas of knowledge that even a second-rate computer programmer would consider essential, because she had just this one task before her and would never need to know those things. By mid-afternoon he could take her to the entrance of the invisible labyrinth.
Hours later, when the light from the setting sun lay heavy and bronze across the lake, he felt her concentration suddenly slacken. They had been sitting all that time side by side at the table and now, as he too shook himself clear of the dream of numbers, he saw that her arm was hairier than his; the fine hairs gave a shot-gold lustre to the green. She moved her hand slightly so that the back of her green hand lay against his brown wrist.
The Green Gene Page 16