Mutant 59

by Kit Pedler

  Spending far more of his grant money than he should have done, he had opted for the short helicopter trip from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan rather than a cab, simply because he wanted to see the city from the air.

  Passing west over Brooklyn, he had looked down at the congested lanes of cars in the criss-crossed streets below and saw them briefly as units in a system or, as he later put it, as blood cells in a blood vessel.

  He saw that the movement of the shining coloured dots formed a rhythmic pattern as they were influenced by each other and by the traffic signals. In a notebook he started to make simple mathematical approximations and, by the time the helicopter had landed, he was subject to the taut excitement which accompanies the arrival of a good and original idea.

  Back in England, after a long, depressing search, he found a job with a systems research unit in the Ministry of Transport and began to develop his ideas to a level of practicability with the aid of highway engineers and electronic specialists.

  He found a name for his project, he called it ‘the learning road system’.

  Simply stated, his idea was to take a localized system of roads and turn it into an almost biological unit. To provide it with senses in the form of electric eyes, pneumatic counting systems fixed to the road surface and television cameras. Then, to feed information from those senses into a computer system capable of adapting its performance as a result of past experience or ‘learning’ as he put it. And finally to connect the computer output to traffic signals and police who would control the flow through the network of roads.

  Where the system differed from others of a similar type was that the computer ‘learnt’ the pattern of traffic through the roads under its control, in this way it could maximize traffic flow on any particular day, week, or month. The only objection to the scheme had been from the police and Atherton.

  The police complained – on what seemed to him an emotional basis – that they were human beings in thrall to a machine. They felt that it degraded their status as individuals.

  Atherton, sitting on the Committee which had finally sanctioned the scheme, had kept up a continous hostility to the whole idea, saying that its limits had not been defined clearly enough and that the performance of the adapting computer could never be predicted sufficiently accurately.

  The area chosen for the experiment was limited to the North by Knightsbridge and to the South by the Cromwell Road, West by Gloucester Road and East by Sloane Street. It had taken fourteen months to install the necessary road equipment and provide the links to the computer and control room in the nearby Imperial College of Science.

  As a control measure, complete estimates of traffic flow through the system had been taken before the experiment started so that the rhythm of flow could be compared before and after the computer was given control of its own ‘body system’. Finally the system was connected to other centres controlling roads into and out of the area, so that any changes in it could be taken up in adjacent districts.

  It took three months for the machine to learn the flow pattern, three months of self-tuition before it achieved total knowledge of its life-function. After repeated tests it was finally given control over its limbs and muscles – the traffic signals and the radio-equipped policemen. Slayter remembered his anxiety when they first relinquished control to the machine.

  They had hung the figures of previous traffic flow beside the counters which showed flow under computer control. For long tense minutes, the counters had shown no change, then slowly – very slowly – began to show an improvement. It was, he remembered, as if the machine had sulked at being given such an anonymous responsibility. Over the succeeding hours, the improvement continued until late in the evening, the jubilant team left the system in the hands of assistants and went off to get suitably drunk.

  Since then the performance of the system had continued to improve until it reached its predicted maximum.

  But now, Slayter was anxious and fidgeting. He nervously moved around the control room, adjusting a file here, removing a piece of wire there.

  In front of him was an array of forty-eight television screens and by the side of each screen an illuminated counter showing traffic flow at a particular intersection. By the side of each counter was a card with a number showing traffic flow before the scheme. He looked at the monitors showing the congested, incessantly moving. columns of cars and buses and hoped against hope that nothing would go wrong. He looked at his watch – ten minutes to go – how the hell do you talk to a minister, how many ‘sirs’, how much deference?

  The control room was quite abnormally tidy – in fact he had only just managed to restrain his secretary from sticking a pot of flowers on the data terminal.

  At last she put her head round the door and said: ‘They’re here.’

  He heard the approaching murmur of voices in the corridor, then the door swung open and the Director came in, followed by the Minister, two aides and – Atherton. The Director made the introductions, he was in his professional charm role.

  ‘Now Slayter perhaps you could give us a rundown on your brainchild. I hear it’s been going very well.’

  ‘Yes, its performance has been quite consistent, sir. Flow rate shows an almost uniform eight point four per cent increase.’

  The Minister trying to maintain a surface interest on his third visit of the day said: ‘Flow rate – ah yes of course you must treat me as very … – you know – about the level of a backward child of three.’ He smiled showing yellow tobacco-stained teeth.

  Slayter went into his ‘routine patter for nits’ as he called it. The Director looked on paternally and the Minister kept up an intermittent nodding; varying the depth of his nod as if to indicate occasional profound understanding.

  The computer in the adjacent room was almost silent except for the staccato groaning noise of the tape heads as they flicked into new positions: its silence giving no indication of the torrent of signals pouring out into the nearby road system. In the arithmetic unit complicated calculations were solved in fractions of a second and logic pulses – the internal language of computers – made exact decisions, all with perfection.

  Except one component.

  That particular one – known to its designers as ‘NOR gate M13’ – made two incorrect decisions, then failed altogether.

  In the control room, Slayter was coming to the end of his discourse but as he did so the result of the component failure had spread out like ripples from a stone in water to the periphery of the machine-controlled road system.

  The Minister was talking:

  ‘Quite extraordinary, Slayter, most interesting, I do congratulate you, I know you haven’t had universal encouragement’ – Atherton shifted from one leg to the other – ‘but I’m sure there will be no more problems in the – ah – financial area.’

  He walked over to the array of monitor screens:

  ‘Let me see now, where are we? Ah yes, I recognize that – the Natural History museum isn’t it? Yes, there’s the V and A and’ – he was moving about like a child with a new toy – ‘extraordinary, gives one a feeling of being inside a brain looking out.’ The Minister’s voice fell away and the attention of all the men became riveted on the small blue screens.

  The component failure had now reverberated throughout the system. At the junction of Exhibition Road and Cromwell Road, traffic lights went from red to green and almost immediately back to red again. A taxi caught halfway across the intersection was slammed sideways by a bus.

  On the next monitor screen, showing the junction of Sloane Street and Knightsbridge, the traffic lights failed and then went totally berserk. Traffic pouring westwards from Piccadilly ground to a fuming halt.

  Road counters in Prince Consort Road suddenly added two zeros to their measurements – as a result the Queen’s Gate lights went permanently to green at the Cromwell Road. Gradually, over a total time of four minutes, the flow of traffic jerked to a halt. Multiple accidents added to the confusion and in the gat
hering dusk the blue lights of ambulances could be seen hopelessly flashing in the choked streets.

  In the control room, there was complete silence, no one wanted to open the conversation. Finally, the Director spoke:

  ‘For God’s sake Slayter, what’s happened?’

  Slayter was stupefied. ‘I’m afraid … I don’t know, I just don’t know’ – he was near to tears. The Minister looked at his aides and said a shade too firmly:

  ‘Well gentlemen, I’m very sorry but – eh – we have to get back to the Ministry.’ He turned to the Director: ‘You’ll let me have a report about all this, won’t you?’ The Director nodded grimly.

  To Slayter he said: ‘I’m sorry, you know, really sorry.’

  As they all began to file out Atherton looked back towards Slayter – his face a mask.

  Two

  Luke Gerrard studied the other three men warily and for the tenth time that day wondered what he was doing there.

  Lounging in various attitudes around the room, the members of the Kramer Consultancy had spent most of the working week trying to solve the problem of a disposable bottle top. Gerrard was sick of the mental effort and of his new colleagues.

  It was five-thirty on a grey November day and the light was gradually fading. The room, Gerrard reflected, looked even more depressing in the dusk. The red brick Victorian Gothic of the converted school they worked in resisted every effort at restoration. Like the sturdy old spinster it was, it remained resolutely unchanged. It was cold, draughty, ill-lit and uncomfortable with a dais at one end and an enormous roller blackboard covering an entire wall. Most of the board was covered with intricate scientific graffiti and the armchairs, tables and floor were littered with crumpled paper torn from foolscap pads. After some ten days’ work they had reached a point of utter stalemate.

  The fault lay partly in the curiously ill-balanced quartet of personalities Kramer had gathered together. For a whole week, the patient, extrovert Scot, Buchan had been throwing up ideas with the regularity of a clay pigeon target machine and Wright, the Englishman, had been studiously shooting them down. Gerrard was sick of both of them. One seemed to cancel the other out, with no advantage to problem solution.

  What should have been stimulating and creative usually turned out to be stultified, and full of tension. He wondered what had been in Kramer’s mind in hiring two such complete opposites in temperament, outlook and scientific method. They had only been fully successful on one major project; the development of the degradable plastic bottle, a row of which now decorated the farther wall to impress any visitor allowed the privilege of the inner sanctum.

  Just how that had been invented, Gerrard felt, was a miracle. He glanced across at the third member of the team, Jim Scanlon.

  Scanlon was younger than either of the other two, fresh faced, a trifle over eager, a good, rather faceless technician, with very little creativity in his make up. He would have made a good salesman, Gerrard reflected. As it was, he seemed to delight in stirring up the differences between Wright and Buchan and egging them on one against the other. To be fair though, given a complex laboratory task, he would do it with complete reliability and precision. A bit of a machine. Gerrard wondered how he made love.

  Betty, the Secretary, came in with a tray of tea. She put it down on the centre table and completed the routine with her catch phrase: ‘Anybody for cakes?’

  The question, Gerrard knew, was purely rhetorical. Wright hardly ever seemed to eat and his fastidious concern over his weight would have stopped him from eating the various brands of glutinously creamy cakes imported by Betty. Buchan, a great gourmet, would never have blunted his appetite for dinner by eating tea.

  The men stared morosely at Betty as she poured out the tea.

  ‘We’re not thinking well now, we’d better stop,’ Wright blinked through his spectacles at Buchan, as if challenging him to make a reply. Buchan, deflated and gloomy, merely shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. ‘No doubt.’

  Betty handed Gerrard his tea and he took it over to the window to look out at the yellow lights flickering on down the street. It was raining again and Gerrard thought, with a slight twinge of nostalgia, that by now the first fall of snow would be whitening the streets back in his home town in Canada. His mind went back two years to his first meeting with Arnold Kramer, when Kramer had flown up to Canada to start a research project at Gerrard’s university.

  They had worked together for three months on Kramer’s experiments into the spontaneous disintegration of plastic and the result had been to give Gerrard a completely new perspective on his life. He thought back farther, probing into his state of mind at that time.

  He had been a doctor, operating a small practice for a mining company in a small Northern Ontario township. He had met Sharon, married her and, infected by her restlessness and drive, had started a new career in experimental biology at the age of thirty. After three years, when Kramer arrived, the academic life was beginning to seem a sterile one-way street to nowhere.

  Kramer had been highly trained at Harvard, by some of the best scientists in North America. A man of colossal intelligence, he also had a driving personality and a fiercely developed critical faculty. At first, Gerrard found him impossible to take. The sheer ferocity of his creative power frankly scared him and it was some time before he was able to form any sort of relationship with the man. But once this had been achieved, he found the contact with Kramer’s mind of tremendous stimulus.

  Kramer stayed at Gerrard’s house and Sharon looked after them. It was a time of high excitement for Gerrard and when Kramer finally left for England to set up his scientific consultancy, Gerrard knew that he would never be able to settle down to the ingrown life of the provincial university, with its Calvinistic power structure.

  Tension developed between Gerrard and Sharon, eventually ending with infidelities on both sides and an unpleasantly messy divorce. Gerrard remained at the University for another year, becoming increasingly isolated in the authoritarian atmosphere of the University, eventually leading a revolt against the power régime imposed by the older professors.

  The revolt succeeded, but in the process, as so often with reformers, he found himself isolated by both factions. It was in this climate that, just a few short months ago, the call had come from Kramer to join his consultancy in London. Gerrard made an instant decision, resigned his post, sold up house, furnishings and car and, his possessions reduced to the contents of two suitcases, flew over and took the job.

  On the surface, the Kramer consultancy was a novel and exciting idea. A group of experts pooling their resources and brains under Kramer’s organizing brilliance to anticipate and come up with solutions to problems in industry and science.

  Eventually stretching themselves beyond the mere solving of problems, they had come up with several highly profitable inventions.

  One of these, developed by the team chemist Wright, was known as Aminostyrene; a new durable insulating plastic now widely used in industry. The other was an attempt to ease waste disposal problems by means of a plastic bottle that under the influence of light broke down to a fine dust.

  A marvellous idea from a fertile and brilliant stable, thought Gerrard, but lately it seemed to him that something had gone out of the group. It was in some way bound up with the personality of Kramer himself.

  Arnold Kramer inspired awe. A compact powerful man, his heavy lidded blue eyes very rarely looked at you; instead he always seemed to be scanning a far horizon slightly above your head. When he lowered his gaze his eyes had an intensity almost impossible to meet. His conversation was brilliant, almost encyclopaedic and yet with a precision and feel for the shape and colour of words that at times verged on the poetic.

  But there had been a change since their shared research in Canada. Or perhaps Gerrard hadn’t really known him then.

  In Canada, Kramer had been ‘on sabbatical’. His erudition and intellect had been turned to research and even, though one hesitated to use the w
ord in connection with Kramer, fun. He had delighted in spending hours, days even, speculating, philosophizing, putting up concepts.

  Now all that had gone. The man Gerrard saw before him seemed a totally different version of the Arnold Kramer he had known. The rich flow of his conversation, sparkling with ideas, seemed to have been compressed into an eclectic, terse, even brusque businessman’s shorthand. Every remark, every concept, every speculation was now directed towards a profit motive. His one criterion seemed to be … does it, or does it not, make money!

  If the philosophical Kramer he had known had been intellectually overpowering, then this new one was doubly so. He was also intimidating in another way. His drive burned like a laser beam. He gave the impression of barely holding in check a cold, massive aggression. Before, Gerrard had felt a special intimacy and friendship with the man; now Kramer seemed to be separated from Gerrard, and the rest of the team, by the aura of a leader. He had turned into a driver who spared no one – himself least of all. There was still a great deal of charm, but it was the direct charm of a man obsessed by a single, driving motivation. Success at all costs.

  The room was darkening, suddenly the lights flashed on and Kramer strode across to the middle of the room.

  ‘Well?’ he looked around. ‘Any luck, gentlemen?’ The men looked up, tired as they were there was something about Kramer which made them sit up from their slumped positions and give him their full attention. At the age of forty-five, Kramer with his height, his heavy powerful shoulders and his slightly stooped, massive head would automatically become the centre of attention in any room he entered.

  ‘Back where we started,’ said Wright, coming over and standing beside him.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Kramer. ‘I fully expected you to end up there.’ Buchan stretched his legs out, put his hands behind his head with a resigned expression. ‘The last few days have been for nothing, then?’