He unlocked a door marked "No Admittance," and there before Dave was a softly-polished panel with a large black circular screen marked off in radians, and two centers of intense violet light, surrounded by an oscillating purple region, its boundary shifting irregularly from moment to moment. Just beside the panel was a lever marked "Danger—Manual Interlock." On the pale green wall nearby was an intercom unit.
Barrow said, "These two centers of light represent the ships' fusion reactors. As long as a band of purple exists around either center, conditions are wrong to move the ship. When the purple disappears, and there are only the two centers of violet light, we have simultaneous efflux instability. Then pull back that lever."
"We have just a few minutes," said Barrow. "When everyone's on board, I'll speak to you through that intercom."
The door clicked shut.
Dave looked at that pale-green door, then turned to urgently will the writhing purple boundary out of existence.
Unaffected, the two bright violet centers swam in a twisting pool of purple.
Dave's heart pounded, and he felt dizzy with effort. But nothing happened.
There was a click from the wall speaker.
"All right, Dave. Everyone's on board. We've opened the dome of the building. Go ahead."
Dave opened his mouth to demand more time, to insist on an explanation—and a calmness slid over him suddenly. The intensity of the pressure was suddenly gone, the writhing purple shrank into the violet centers of light.
Unhesitatingly, Dave pulled back the lever.
There was blurring of consciousness, suggesting a room seen in a rapidly flickering light.
Then Barrow's voice was saying, "Break interlock."
Dave shoved forward the lever.
Once more, consciousness was continuous. He had a strange feeling as if he had raced over the precisely-spaced railroad ties after a train, and had finally caught it and hauled himself aboard.
He glanced at the intercom.
"Will you need me right away?"
"Not where you are. Come up to the viewer. You turn to your left as you go out, and up the ladder to your right."
"Be right up."
Dave tried to turn around, and promptly drifted up from the floor. It was only then that he really believed it.
It had worked.
They were out in space.
Earth hung on the screen before them like a big blue-green basketball with a tiny incandescent plume bursting from its equator.
Anita, her face pale, was clinging to Dave as they watched the screen. The crowd around them was tense and silent, their gaze riveted on the screen.
Bardeen and Barrow were nearby. Bardeen murmured, "It's started?"
"Yes." Barrow's eyes were shut.
"Self-sustaining?"
"It must be."
On the screen, the blazing plume strengthened and grew brighter. Dave held his breath.
The single flame erupted into a blazing circle that shot around the globe.
The terrible heat flashed the nearby seas into vapor, huge cracks appeared, and the sudden violence hurled up chunks of the solid planet that were the size of mountains. Then the blinding scene was blurred by dense expanding clouds of vapor.
How long they'd watched, Dave didn't know, but he felt worn-out and sick. He held Anita, who was crying miserably and quietly.
Bardeen turned wearily from the screen. "Any chance of the fragments fusing themselves together again?"
Barrow shook his head. "Just another asteroid belt. Maybe that's what caused the first one."
Dave forced his dulled mind to assess the situation. Science had destroyed a planet. And science had enabled a few survivors to escape in ships especially equipped to colonize another planet.
Bardeen, apparently thinking along the same line, said, "At least these ships are equipped to make us self-sustaining. We have advanced equipment, and the reactors put more energy at our disposal than the whole human race had twenty years ago. We can start again."
Anita looked up. "And try more scientific experiments? How long before the next mistake?"
"Ask Dave," Bardeen said quietly, "and he'll tell you our method is different. An experiment isn't an experiment when you can foresee the result, and stop in time."
He turned to the screen where the blaze of light glowed through boiling clouds of vapor.
"That," he said, "was the last experiment."
Rags From Riches
Lost Bear Jct., Alaska 99731
Wednesday; Fog, No Snow
Mr. William T. Whittaker
626 Campus Drive
Blickweiler U.
Sandrigham, Illinois 60054
Dear Bill:
As you know, I have trouble writing letters. Why, I don't know—after all, I write stories for a living. But anyway, Margin Books just paid for that spy opus, and the bank tells me the check cleared all right, so you can count on my answering letters a little sooner.
The reason? You may not be aware, in your ivory tower, that your old roommate is up to the latest technological marvels and prepared to take full advantage of them at the first chance that offers. It takes effort, but it is worth it. What I have done is to take advantage of the current little downblip in the computer industry—sales off forty per cent, 16,000 laid off, four major manufacturers bankrupt—that sort of thing—to buy myself, at fire-sale prices, a completely new Vectrosupermax Business System, with all its bundled software (16 different programs: total value, if bought individually, $6,472.89).
As you may know, before the market took its downturn, Vectrosupermax was probably the leading manufacturer of hardware using the KBCDOS operating system and the 99Q processor. Two years ago, Vectrosupermax was a comet lighting the sky both day and night with new sales records. Today, they're selling them out of the back of a truck down in Mosquito Forks, and very grateful for a sale. Well, that's high tech, for you.
But to get back to what this means from my viewpoint, the fact is that the Vectrosupermax may be a drag on the market, but it works as well today as it did two years ago. This calamity in the marketplace means it is possible for me to make this initial comment on the old manual typewriter, connect the Vectrosupermax plug to the outlet (I mentioned we got electricity in my last letter), hit 10 on the keyboard (a special command so it will just print what I tell it to, and not reproduce the commands themselves), and then I simply reel this length of paper into the Vectrosuperprinter's maw, and you have a vivid record of technological progress as applied to the art of letter writing:
Sdfl;ksdkasdgf;saasdfiuas8u 234]?
SYNTAX ERROR 66
Memory munged
1234567890-=°!@#$%2[*()__+ QWERTYUIOP?¶qwertyuiop[]
1234567890-=°!@#$%2[*()__+ QWERTYUIOP?¶qwertyuiop[]
1234567890-=°!@#$%2[*()__+ QWERTYUIOP?¶qwertyuiop[]
WARNING! DIVISION BY ZERO!
EITHER YOU OR I HAS MADE A MISTAKE. I CAN'T FILE THIS FILE.
PLEASE GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING AND TRY AGAIN.
(Buffer Overflow)
SYNTAX ERROR 96
Well, I have to admit, that was
n't much fun. I suppose I should
have read the manual, but tha
t wasn't very attractive either.
There are sixteen different man
uals, and Now, what the—
00001Well, I have to admit, that was
00002have reread the manual, but tha
00003There are sixteen different man
*##?a. . .22%!...2..C###!
. . .$.opy..E..@@#..cC..?
.X..18.p..6ro,,1982.tt.
. . ...righj..4.##..7.##.
Vectrosuperwriter is protected by a sophisticated lockup program keyed to your individual computer and its included hardware and software. If you attempt to use our proprietary DEBUGG utility to crack the copy-protection, our built-in safeguards will lock up your computer every time you use the software, and we will be automatically notified at once when yo
u try to use the modem. Just take this as a friendly warning and GET YOUR GUMMY LITTLE FINGERS OUT OF OUR CODE BEFORE WE CHOP THEM OFF!!
(Use VDUMP for non-ASCII.)
WARNING! SQRT OF NEG NUMBER!
gods and little fishes!
this is "user friendly"?
re's the stuff I typed?
ll with all this! What
o now? This son-of-a-
ch squeezes everthing
o a narrow column and
nts it out with letters
sing on the left. The
trosupermax Quikcard
mand summary is around
e somewhere. Ah, yes,
e we are. "Escape-LM"
t could be simpler?
x Error 111!
W
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,
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l
l
!
S
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!
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a
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e
s
—
H
'
m
.
.
.
Vectrosupermax Elapsetime Clock
This session: 02H29M14.7S
Vectrosupermax Elapsetime Clock
This session: 14H46M11.96S
Vectrosupermax Elapsetime Clock
This session: 42H21M38.6S
Bill—As you may notice from a close inspection of the typeface and the unevenness of the print, we are back to the old manual again. It is Friday now, and there really was a pretty good length of letter there on Thursday, but it sort of disappeared when I hit the X on the keyboard instead of the S. It seems that X is the easy mnemonic for "eXpunge," and I was reaching for the S but got the X by mistake. Oh, well. My error, of course.
There's a kind of long scratch across the top of the machine, where I only just managed to catch myself in time—I all of a sudden had the axe in my hand, and must have let out a yell because it was the middle of the night and out back the rooster started to crow. I see the dog just crawling out from under the bed now, and there were two cats in the room when I started, but I haven't seen them since I read the Vectrosupermax "Easy-Does-It" manual. It has a lot of cute pictures in it. Heh-heh. And a sheet of last-minute corrections and changes that aren't noted anywhere else. Heh-heh-heh.
Well, Bill, I guess progress has its price, so it will take me maybe just a little longer than I expected. But if I have this thing really mastered before I go in for next month's groceries, count on me to add a few good long pages after this paragraph.
All the best,
Jim
Bugs
Randy Pratt, under the hanging ad lettered "Sharke Computers," looked down pityingly on the woman customer standing clench-fisted by the showroom door. Because of the glare of the morning sun on the windows of a car parked outside, he had a little trouble even seeing her. But he strained hard to be fair.
"If," he said, locating a business card in his jacket pocket, "there is anything we can realistically do for you, just get in touch with me. But what you're asking here is not realistic. Now, I hope you'll excuse me. I am speaking shortly at the seminar." Randy favored her with a conversation-closing smile, and handed her his business card.
The customer ripped the card across three times, threw the pieces on the floor, and went out. The automatic door closer shut the door gently.
Randy exhaled, murmured, "Cretin," and picked up the pieces. He went around back of a software display to the wastebasket.
Across the room, Mort, the part-time salesman, came out from behind a display of desk, portable, and lapsize computers. "What's her problem?"
"Oh, she bought a Sharke Superbyte here a few weeks ago. Now she's got a Shomizota printer with a serial interface, I suppose from Barricuda Byte Shop. Naturally, she doesn't know a bit from a detachable keyboard, so she figures it's our job to mate the printer with the Sharke."
"Stupid. But that Shomizota's a sweet little printer. You can't blame her for getting it."
"Naturally, I don't blame her. It's cheaper than ours, you don't have to be a weightlifter to move it, and people don't run for cover when it prints. The problem is, who's going to get it working for free? It's standard with the Barricuda. Of course, the Barricuda—"
Mort looked knowledgeable. "Oh, it's not so bad."
Randy stared at him. "It's got the reset button next to the left-hand shift key. And the keyboard's got an extra-light touch."
"It's a fast keyboard."
"I saw a guy demonstrate the Barricuda, with a big crowd around him, and about halfway through he accidentally bumped the reset. Everything on the screen disappeared. Then it lit up with, 'KINDLY INSERT YOUR SYSTEM DISK IN DRIVE A.' You like losing everything you've done because you bump the wrong key?"
"There are—ah—one or two bugs—" Mort glanced at the door. "I'll straighten the magazines." Randy glanced around.
Through the glare appeared an unshaven, strongly built man wearing a sweat-soaked T-shirt. His left hand flung open the door. His voice was rough.
"Somebody here named Curtis?"
Randy quickly thrust out one of his cards. "Mort, whatever became of Curtis?"
Mort's voice came from back of the magazine rack.
"Working over at Wolfe Computer, the last I heard."
Randy nodded and turned back.
"Wolfe Computer is out on Industrial Way. You take a left, just up the—"
"He was working here when he sold my kid a Gnat computer. When it quit, Curtis says you can't fix it, the company's broke."
"Well, I'm sure Curtis—"
"It's the store's guarantee. When do we bring it in?"
"Well, I—I'm not quite sure of our policy on Gnat repairs, and—"
"Don't hand me that."
"Sir, I'll tell you what. The store manager is out today. He should be in tomorrow morning around eleven."
"I'm working at eleven."
"Then I'm afraid I don't see—"
"I'm here now."
"There's—"
"The kid worked all summer to buy that Gnat. You're going to fix it."
Randy glanced at his watch. "Mort, will you take care of this? I have to get over to the seminar." Mort's disembodied voice said miserably, "What can I do?"
Their visitor glanced around. "The thing is guaranteed, Buddy. You can fix it."
Randy stepped behind the long counter with its software display, featuring dragons, dwarfs, chests of gold, spaceships belching fire, competing captains of industry shaking their fists at one another, columns of stock prices, charts, graphs, tax forms, spreadsheets—and then he was going down the hall past a door with a window beside it that looked into the repair shop, where a technician in gray laboratory-style coat beckoned urgently. Randy stepped in, closed the door tightly behind him, and nodded.
"Mike. I'm just headed for the seminar. I have to give a talk on—heh—The Future of Computing."
"Who's that out front?"
"You remember the kid that bought our last Gnat computer? The kid that knew all about processors, operating systems, machine code, assembly language, higher level languages—you name it?"
Prescription for Chaos Page 18