The Infinity Program

by Richard H Hardy

  Chapter Ten

  It was just after seven the next morning. Jon was sitting at his kitchen table drinking coffee and glancing down at the headlines of the morning paper when the phone rang. It was Lettie.

  “I’m sorry I hung up on you last night. I really am. It’s not like me at all, honestly. I just got so mad because it felt like you and Harry were in your little boys’ club—no girls allowed. I have enough of that at work.”

  “I can see why you’d be ticked off, and if it were up to me, I’d tell you. But the truth is that Harry specifically asked me not to talk about it.”

  “Are you still calling in sick?”

  “I already have,” said Jon. “I’m headed over to Harry’s after breakfast.”

  “So you’re helping Harry build his Beowulf cluster?”

  “Yup. We still have some more hardware upgrades and then we’ve got to reformat all the drives and load up Linux on each one of them. And Harry’s got to write his messaging software. It’ll probably take the rest of the day.”

  “How about if I swing by after work and deliver a couple of pizzas? Would that be cool?”

  “Hey, that would be great! You know Harry. He never even thinks about stopping for food.”

  “You don’t think he’ll mind?”

  “He’d better not, or he’ll answer to me!”

  “Well, see you around six or so, Jon,” she said and hung up the phone.

  Jon arrived at Harry’s place shortly after eight in the morning. When Harry answered the door, it was obvious he had been working all night long. There was stubble on his chin and his eyes looked sunken. Despite his appearance, he moved briskly and was obviously at the top of his game.

  “Boy, am I glad to see you!” he said. “I sure can use your help.”

  Jon looked across the living room and saw twelve PCs stacked in groups of three and networked together. Pieces and parts of another four PCs were still scattered about the living room floor.

  “Looks like you’re doing okay on your own,” said Jon, pointing toward the tiered PCs.

  “They still need to have my new OS and Linux loaded and then every goddamned one of them has to be configured. It’ll be a custom job for each one. I need very precise adjustments for any variations in processing speed.”

  Harry crossed the living room and grabbed a double handful of diskettes from the coffee table. “Here. You go ahead with the installs while I finish up with the last four PCs.”

  “Man, you’ve got the Linux on diskettes?” asked Jon, not bothering to hide his disbelief.

  “Is that a problem?” said Harry.

  “Most definitely! I’ve heard horror stories about loading these old versions of Linux, and with new OS on top of that, it’s kind of like threading a needle in a dark room.”

  “There’s an old saying among us hardcore types: ‘Know what you are doing.’ It’s as simple as that.”

  “It may be as simple as that for you, Harry. But I most definitely do not know what I’m doing, especially when it comes to loading both Linux and your new OS.”

  He felt like a complete fool for volunteering for such an impossible job. He felt like the kid who couldn’t swim being thrown into the deepest part of the river.

  “I’ll walk you through the first install,” said Harry. “We’ll load the master first.”

  The two of them pulled up chairs to a keyboard and monitor set up awkwardly on a small card table.

  In the first two minutes Harry whizzed through about two dozen separate steps.

  “Time out! Stop! Hold everything!” Jon cried out in distress.

  “What’s wrong?” said Harry.

  “You’re going too fast. I need a notebook so I can write down these steps.”

  “Steps?” Harry asked in amazement. “It’s just boom-boom-boom, that’s all there is to it.”

  “That’s all there is to it if you know what you’re doing,” said Jon.

  The two of them continued working together for the next hour. Jon had a notebook in his lap and scrawled away furiously in an attempt to keep up with Harry. All the while Harry had a martyred look on his face. It was obvious he didn’t enjoy working at such a slow pace. The closest he came to losing his cool was when he scolded Jon for his approach.

  “You’ve got to stop looking at things as steps, Jon. You have to see them in chunks.”

  That may work for you, Jon thought to himself. But not for me and the rest of the human race.

  After a little more than an hour, they completed the installation of the master node. Jon had been stretched to his limit, while Harry was relieved to get back to what, for him, was a real-time work pace. Harry had been called many things in his day, but “teacher” was not one of them.

  Jon moved on to the Linux installation of the first slave node but found it tough going. He had been forced to write so fast to keep up with Harry’s blistering pace that he could barely read his own handwriting, and had to repeatedly stop and ask refresher questions. The morning was half-shot by the time he finished the first slave node.

  The second and third installations went a little better. By that time, Harry had finished assembling the final four PCs and wired them into the network. He then began writing the messaging software. He was so absorbed in this task that Jon almost needed to send up a flare to get his attention.

  “Lettie’s going to stop over tonight around six with pizza,” Jon said.

  Harry did not respond.

  “I said, Lettie’s going to stop over tonight around six with pizza!” Jon shouted.

  Five minutes passed as Jon debated whether or not he should shake Harry by his shoulder to get his attention.

  Surprisingly, Harry turned toward him. “Did you say something?”

  For the third time, Jon repeated himself.

  “Oh,” was Harry’s reply.

  Jon was irritated by this amazingly succinct response to his news. He stood and walked over to where Harry was sitting. “Personally, I think it’s pretty damn nice of Lettie to go out of her way like this.”

  Harry did not look up. “I guess so.”

  Jon put his hand on Harry’s shoulder to attract his full attention. Harry looked up at him.

  “Is there something you don’t like about Lettie?” Jon asked.

  Harry was decidedly uncomfortable. He shifted from foot to foot and then crossed his arms in front of his chest so tightly that his shoulders narrowed. “She makes me nervous,” he finally said.

  “Why?” Jon asked, taken aback by Harry’s answer.

  “Well, first of all, she’s so goddamned good-looking ….” Harry said rather lamely.

  Jon waited for him to continue. Harry was obviously reluctant to speak his mind.

  “And what else?” Jon prompted.

  For a moment, Harry held back with a sour look on his face, almost as though he were afraid to utter something unspeakable.

  “She’s into Macs,” said Harry, his disgust evident.

  “So?”

  Harry looked at Jon as though he were completely obtuse. “I mean she’s a Mac person. She doesn’t even own a PC.”

  “So what,” said Jon.

  Harry looked stunned at Jon’s inability to see his point. His mouth opened as though he were about to say something, but snapped shut. An expression akin to disgust flashed across his face. “And she’s always blowing her buffer!” he added.

  Jon shook his head in disbelief and went back to his own side of the room. He had been tempted to press the issue but there was no point in prodding Harry further. Once or twice he had asked Harry directly if there had ever been women in his life and Harry had been acutely uncomfortable. He had actually been evasive. Was he afraid of them? Was he confused about how to interact with them? Had his interest in computers and programming completely swallowed up that part of his emotional life?

  By late afternoon, Jon had loaded ten of the PCs and Harry had finished writing the messaging software.

  “Boy, you sure work
slowly,” said Harry.

  “The gears turn slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.”

  “Did you just come up with that?” Harry asked. “That’s kind of cool. It’s almost like a saying.”

  Jon shook his head.

  “Something wrong?” Harry asked.

  “Not a thing.”

  “You look tired,” said Harry. “Why don’t you take a break? I can load the rest of them. There’s stuff in the fridge.”

  Jon took his friend’s advice and walked out into the kitchen. He was appalled by what greeted him in the fridge. Haunting the shelves were the remains of past meals, forgotten and rotting. A green-colored mold had erupted over plastic containers. Uncovered plates held the remnants of unrecognizable food. Jon looked inside a brown paper bag and saw a full six-pack of Budweiser. There was a cash register receipt lying on the top of it. Out of curiosity, Jon glanced at it. It was dated the previous year. What the hell, Jon thought, Beer keeps in the fridge.

  Jon ambled back into the living room with the beer in his hand and stretched out on the sofa. While he relaxed, he sipped his beer and watched Harry work away like a galley slave.

  It was about five-thirty when Harry finished loading the final six PCs in the Beowulf cluster. Somehow, Harry had managed all this in just over an hour’s time.

  “How could you possibly have loaded them all so quickly?” Jon asked.

  “Once you get the Master node and the first slave loaded, there are a number of shortcuts which open up.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you show them to me, Harry?”

  “Because if I had,” said Harry, “I’d still be walking you through all the steps.”

  If Jon were a vain man, he would certainly have been offended by Harry’s casual remark. But he was a realist and understood that Harry’s skill with computers was vastly superior to his own. Harry was just being factual. For Harry, one hundred and one separate steps were just a chunk that he could buzz through in a minute flat.

  “So, are we close to testing?” Jon said.

  “Close,” Harry replied. “But not there yet. I’ve got to run diagnostics on the configuration between the master and each of the slaves. Then we’ll be ready to fire the baby up.”

  Harry proceeded with his testing as Jon watched from the sofa and wondered what Harry was up to with the Beowulf cluster. Something profound had obviously happened to him, however briefly, during the installation of Big Moe. Or had it? Was it possible that Harry had gone around the bend? Perhaps he’d sustained some subtle brain damage when he’d had his fall at Tartan’s Crag. Maybe it was the kind of incipient dementia that grew worse over time.

  Yet, beneath all his doubts, Jon had an abiding faith in his friend. Since the incident at Tartan’s Crag, it was almost as though Harry had entered a deeper, more profound stratum of his identity. He was fulfilling a promise that previously had been latent but unfulfilled. Although he had always been a superb technician, he had become more creative. Jon wondered if this was a natural progression in his friend’s development or if it had been triggered.

  At six-thirty on the dot, the doorbell rang. Jon jumped up from the sofa and opened the front door. There stood Lettie holding two large pizzas, still dressed in her work clothes—a formal black skirt and a linen blouse. She looked so incredible that Jon could only stare.

  “Well, can I come in?” she asked, smiling in her most winning way.

  “Of course! Let me take those pizzas for you.”

  Jon took the pizzas and stacked them on the kitchen table. When he returned to the living room, Lettie was standing by the bookshelves, looking at Harry. There was a crestfallen look on her face.

  “Hi, Lettie,” she said under her breath. “It’s nice to see you.”

  Harry continued to work feverishly on the other side of the room, oblivious to Lettie’s presence.

  Jon walked over and gave her shoulder a gentle tap. “I sure am glad to see you, Lettie. It’s so nice of you to stop by. You’re a sight for sore eyes!”

  Lettie turned and flashed a dimmer smile than the one she had given him in the doorway. “One out of two isn’t bad. Are you ready for some pizza?”

  “I’m hungry as a bear! Harry doesn’t seem to believe in eating. We’ve been flat out all day without so much as a lunch break or a snack. I don’t know how the guy does it.”

  “That’s just crazy,” Lettie said. “Harry has no sense at all. People need to eat.”

  “How about some pizza, Harry?” Jon called out in a booming voice.

  Harry didn’t respond. He stared intently at the monitor in front of him and was making a peculiar set of gestures with his hands. It looked like he was urging a process or procedure to move along more rapidly.

  Jon walked across the room and touched his shoulder. Harry jerked violently.

  “Pizza. Hot pizza. Harry eat pizza?” Jon might have been addressing a two-year-old.

  Lettie laughed.

  Harry looked up. “Pizza?” he said in a faraway voice. “Maybe when I’m finished. Another half hour or so.”

  “Lettie’s here.” Jon nodded toward Lettie.

  “Hi, Lettie,” said Harry in a perfunctory way before turning back to the monitor.

  Jon and Lettie looked at each other. Without so much as a word, they left the living room and entered the kitchen.

  Even though Jon was ravenously hungry, he made himself slow down so that he could appreciate Lettie’s company. In the back of his head, he calculated that this was the third time this week he and Lettie had dined together.

  The two of them sat together at Harry’s kitchen table. Lettie glanced about with distaste. “Men! They just don’t know how to clean up after themselves.”

  “Don’t judge me by Harry,” Jon said quickly. “I can cook, I can clean and I can do laundry. My Mother made sure I knew how to look after myself.”

  “Really? You’d make some lucky woman a good wife,” Lettie said.

  They laughed and helped themselves to second slices of pizza, eating straight out of the box because not a clean plate was to be found in Harry’s kitchen.

  “I just wish like hell I had some idea what Harry is trying to do,” said Lettie.

  “That makes two of us.”

  “But I thought he told you.”

  “Not really. He’s trying to duplicate something that happened at the installation of Big Moe last Saturday. He’s given me very sketchy details about what he’s trying to duplicate, but he made me promise not to reveal them to anyone.”

  “I can respect that,” said Lettie. “You know, since you guys took your trip to the mountains, Harry’s changed somehow. I don’t know if this makes any sense to you but it’s as though he’s more like Harry Sale than he used to be.”

  “I know exactly what you mean. I was thinking the same thing myself a little earlier this afternoon. It’s as though there’s been a deepening or crystallization. What used to be just a tendency is now a hard and fast attribute.”

  “It scares me, it really does. He was a little extreme even before.”

  Almost at the same time Lettie said this, the lights went out. They were suddenly in complete darkness.

  “Goddamned son-of-a-bitch!” said Harry in a voice so loud that it echoed throughout the house.

  Lettie opened her purse and took out her key ring. There was a miniature flashlight attached. She flashed it on and the two of them made their way cautiously out into the living room.

  “What happened, Harry?” Jon asked.

  “Goddamned power overload. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this. Sixteen PCs is more than the crummy wiring in this place can handle.”

  “Where is the fuse box?” Lettie asked, her voice cool and practical.

  “The circuit breakers are in the laundry room, off the kitchen,” said Harry, disgust coloring his tone.

  Lettie stood up from her chair and shone her miniature flashlight about the room until she spotted the door to the laundry room. Jon followed her as s
he made her way toward it. Two minutes later, Lettie had re-set the circuit breakers. There was light again.

  When they returned to the kitchen, Harry was standing by the kitchen doorway. There was a dejected look on his face as he absentmindedly nibbled on a piece of pizza.

  “I can’t believe I missed that,” he said in a low voice, more to himself than to them. “I’m losing it. I thought I had everything worked out, but I forgot that this place was wired back in the sixties. There’s no way it could handle the power requirements of sixteen PCs.”

  “You’re a bright guy, Harry. You’ll figure a way around it,” Lettie said.

  Harry shrugged, his expression still hang-dog. “I can’t believe I missed something as simple as that,” he said again as he took a big bite out of the slice of pizza.

  “Wasn’t it nice of Lettie to bring the pizza over for us?” said Jon. The look on Lettie’s face when she had arrived with the pizza was still vivid in Jon’s memory. She had looked so nurturing. How on earth could Harry be oblivious to a woman like this?

  Harry made no reply. His mouth was turned down in morose expression, and his eyes retained their now customary faraway look.

  Jon and Lettie both did their best to make conversation as they finished their dinner, but Harry remained taciturn and unresponsive.

  “Well,” said Lettie as she folded up the empty pizza box, “I’ve got a big day at the office tomorrow. I’ve got to get going.”

  “Me too,” said Jon. “I wish I could blow off work again tomorrow, Harry, so I could give you a hand, but I’ve got a deadline to meet. I can stop by after work, though. And if you think of anything you need, just give me a call at the office.”

  For the first time since the power failure, Harry’s glum look disappeared and a half-smile appeared on his face. “I may take you up on that, pal. Don’t be surprised if you hear from me.”

  As the two of them left Harry’s place and the door closed behind them, Jon turned toward Lettie. “That was really nice of you to bring the pizza. Thanks.”

  Lettie smiled. “Well, as I said earlier, one out of two isn’t bad.”

  She took a step away from him and then changed her mind and moved back. She seemed more relaxed than she had inside. She even managed an affectionate smile.