by John Gardner
“Not true,” Craine said, “or if it is true, it hasn’t been my doing.”
“Perhaps that’s so,” McClaren said. “My point remains the same. We have every reason to believe that Carnac may in actual fact be a psychic—and no reason, offhand, to doubt that the murderer has reached the same conclusion. If so, that would explain, of course—”
“You got this idea from Dr. Tummelty?” Craine asked.
“Not exactly. It’s true that we discussed the subject. He’s been interested in Carnac for some time.”
Craine sucked hard at his pipe. No smoke came through. “It’s strange to me how you people all know each other,” he said. “University of twenty or more thousand students, must be a faculty of hundreds at least, and yet all you people”—he held out his left hand, fingers extended, and counted with the tip of his pipe stem—“you, Dr. Tummelty, Professor Davies in English, the computer-center man—what’s his name, Furth—”
McClaren smiled. “All department heads, you’ll notice.”
“Ah! So that’s it!”
Again McClaren stole a glance at his watch. When he saw that Craine had seen, he said, “Quarter after one. I’d better get a move on! By the way, I had a talk with the Denhams, this morning—Denham’s Tobacco Shop.”
“Yes, I go there all the time,” Craine said.
“So I understand. You were drunk, I presume?”
“I suppose you could say it got a little out of hand.”
“You remember what happened?”
“Very little of it.”
McClaren thought about it, then nodded, grim. “It’s interesting, this weakness of memory you claim. I did a little checking on your agency in Chicago, especially the last few weeks there.”
“I thought you might.”
“You can’t really pretend you’ve forgotten all that.”
“Only when people let me.”
“That young woman, your client, the one who disappeared. What do you think happened to her?”
“I imagine she’s dead.”
“Hmm. Yes. I thought so. So do I.” He got up off the edge of the desk and took a step toward the door. “Well, good day, Gerald. Glad you happened by.”
Craine remained there, thinking nothing of importance, thinking how he was supposed to be shaken, and was, no doubt, but if so, shaken too deeply for any surface effect, so that it made no difference, at least for now, then rose at last, his knees trembling, and made his way to the door.
“Can I help you?” the Indian woman asked, looking up at him with a start.
Craine stood turning his limp hat in his hands, obsequiously smiling. “I wonder if there’s someone I could ask a few questions. My name’s Gerald B. Craine, Detective.” He hunted from pocket to pocket for his license, but it was mysteriously gone. With a jerk, he reached out his hand and dangled it in front of her. She looked at it a moment, then reluctantly reached up her small, thin fingers, and shook hands with him. “I thought perhaps my old friend Professor Furth—”
“I’m sorry, Professor Furth isn’t here today.” She brightened, almost bloomed, suddenly confident, now that they had between them some common reality.
“Perhaps someone else then—”
“What kinds of questions did you have in mind?” she asked.
“Oh, things about computers, the staff here—I hardly know. You see, I’m working on a case. In fact, several cases.” He smiled, once more clutching his hat, looking to the woman at the second desk for help, but the second woman had no suggestions, simply hunched her back and made a face. “Just a moment,” the Indian woman said. She rolled back her chair, swung around sideways and up, and crossed to a door opposite Professor Furth’s. She opened it a foot, poked her head in, and called “Dennis?”—then, “Murray …” She opened the door a little wider, slipped through, and partly closing it, her hand still on the edge—fingernails reddish black—talked with someone inside. After a moment she came out again, just behind her a plump, short man with curly hair and thick glasses. “Detective Craine,” she began, and hesitated.
“Hello,” the man said, “I’m Murray Weintraub.”
“How do you do!” Craine said, eagerly bowing, almost throwing his arms out to make up for the stillness of the man who stood before him, planted on his small feet (sandals, dark blue socks), like a placid Chinese figurine. He wore a tie, slightly loosened, an Oxford-cloth shirt a little tight at the waist, a woven leather belt on which the buckle was cocked askew. “I’m a friend of Ira Katz—perhaps you know him?” Craine asked.
“I know Ira,” the man said. His expression showed no change, though his use of Ira’s name was as familiar as a relative’s. From his balding, curly head to the soles of his sandals not a muscle moved; he was the soul of non-expression. Even when he shifted his eyes to the right, the movement was expressionless: It was as if he had simply decided to look at something and had looked. “Won’t you come in?” he said, and turned, pushing the door open. When they were both inside, the door falling shut behind them, he said, standing motionless again, “What did you want to know?”
“As I was just now telling your friend out there, I’m not sure,” Craine said. “Who his friends are, what he does here—what all you people do here—what you know about Miss Vaught …” When the man showed nothing, apparently still waiting, still assessing the situation, Craine broke in on himself. “What should I call you, ‘Professor’? ‘Doctor’?”
“Murray’s fine, or professor—whatever you like.” He slightly turned his head, the rest of him unmoving. Craine followed his gaze.
“When did you last see him?—Ira Katz, I mean,” Craine asked.
“An hour ago, maybe an hour and a half,” Weintraub said. He stopped walking for a moment, watching lights flick on and off, then moved forward again. “He was here when McClaren came. They had a long talk.”
“I see,” Craine said. His voice showed nothing of the alarm that leaped up in him. How odd that McClaren had kept it to himself! But no, not really odd. Craine sighed and pushed his hands into his pockets, slowly shaking his head. He’d do the same thing himself, in point of fact. If it moves, suspect it; also if it doesn’t move. What was the saying? To a man who has nothing but a hammer, the whole world’s a nail.
“What does all this do?” Craine asked, waving at the machines.
Professor Weintraub for just an instant smiled. “That’s not easy to explain,” he said. “Briefly, it creates reality. Cup of coffee, Mr. Craine?” Economically—hardly more than the movement of one hand—he indicated a coffee maker, Styrofoam cups, cream and sugar, black and white plastic chairs.
“Why yes, thank you,” Craine said, and at once got out his pipe. Carefully, with gestures as expressionless as his face, Professor Weintraub filled two cups and, at Craine’s direction, added sugar and cream. “I understand,” Craine said when they were seated, “Ira Katz has a fairly ambitious program going.”
“I imagine he does,” Professor Weintraub said. “I’m not familiar with it, but all the programs that come through here are ambitious. It’s all nonsense—practically all nonsense.” His eyes moved, looking around the room, the rest of him quite still. “You’re in Bedlam, Mr. Craine.”
“I see,” Craine said, and waited.
Professor Weintraub raised his cup and drank, then lowered the cup to his knee and sat motionless again. “You asked what we do here,” he said. “It’s an interesting challenge, a question like that. Let me see if I can tell you.” He crossed his legs at the knee and stared at the line where the wall met the ceiling. He sipped his coffee, then—motionless again—began: “I myself came into computers through mathematics. Computers, to me, are simply large, fast calculators. They add, subtract, multiply, and so on; sort things very rapidly, by various criteria; remember things infallibly—in other words, they remember and manipulate formal symbols, figure out the values in a particular case of, say F = ma or E = mc2, to say nothing of equations vastly more complex; and in some cases they sho
w you, on a viewing screen or printout, pictures of what they’re doing or have done. You’ve seen examples—computer games, random patterns … You can get a computer to show you what the planet would look like if you travelled past it faster than, by the Einsteinian laws of energy and mass, it’s possible to travel. We did that once at MIT. Or take a humdrum example. On my office wall I have a map I’ll show you when we get there: it locates all earthquake activity since I960. There’s an interesting point to be made about that; remind me to come back to it.
“Perhaps the best way to get at what we’re after is to explain what computers can do and what they shouldn’t do, not that they can’t (from a certain point of view), and why we’re in trouble when computers are set to doing what they shouldn’t.
“All right, so where are we. What do we do here. We create reality, I said earlier. That’s just about it. Sometimes we do it in fairly innocent ways, running the computations that guide a rocketship and put a man on the moon, or figuring the odds that it will rain and ruin your garden party. In cases like that, the output, so to speak, is that human beings are in closer touch with reality than before, or anyway no further removed from it. The astronaut may have no idea how he got where he got—even the people at the NASA consoles may have no very clear idea, in fact—but that’s moondust under his feet: he’s in touch. That’s usually not how it works with computers: usually the machine takes over for reality, and as the poet says, ‘You can’t go home again.’
“There are two ways to put it. On one hand, the computer transforms the world—transforms it utterly; on the other, it intercedes between the human mind and the world, the ‘old reality,’ if you like, and just sits there, like an impenetrable fog. Let me explain. Start with how the computer transforms the world in the post office, in the Pentagon, in business, everywhere—and I don’t really mean just here in the United States—there had come to be just too much paperwork and too many technical steps in certain jobs, such as automobile building, for human beings to keep up with. Along came the computer and ‘saved the day’—that is, saved the status quo. If the computer hadn’t come along and jacked up the existing welfare distribution systems—hence their philosophical rationales—someone might have thought of eliminating much of the need for welfare by, for example, introducing a negative income tax. But the very erection of an enormously large and complex, computer-based welfare administration created, inevitably, motivation for keeping the system as it was. No politician likes to throw away millions, even billions, of the taypayers’ dollars. Welfare’s a minor example, of course. The most obvious and ludicrous is our so-called military defense system—computer-built, of course—a ‘servomechanism,’ as the Pentagon likes to say, spread out over an area comparable to the whole American continent. You’ve read of it, no doubt: the SAGE air-defense system. Needless to say, once we had SAGE, we had to assume that ‘they’ had one too, so we had to apply our computer technology to designing offensive weapons and strategies that could overpower our own defense, that is, ‘their’ presumed defense, and then we had to assume that ‘they’ had similar weapons and strategies … and so on and so on, through the MIRVs and MARVs, ABMs and forthcoming GKWs … You get the point. Computers have changed the world into something not easy to change back from. The kids in the street yell, ‘No NUKES, no NUKES!’ But they’ve only got one hope, in my opinion: learn math, become computer freaks, learn to guess handshakes and get inside the machines. Because the people they’re yelling at aren’t the ones who do the thinking. The ones who do the thinking are little plastic chips.”
“Wait,” Craine said. “You spoke of ‘handshakes.’ What’s that?”
“Entrance code, that’s all. Every big computer has a code you have to know to get into it. You give the computer the secret handshake and it’s willing to talk to you.”
“And it’s possible to figure these things out?”
“To some extent. It all depends. Mostly you get the code from some person who knows it—officer of the company, who’s a friend of yours, for instance. You’d be surprised how careless people are about codes. Mostly, I suppose, they have so little understanding of the computers, they’re unaware of the risk.”
“What are the risks?”
“Theft, sabotage. A good computer freak might get into the IRS computer and erase its whole file on him, or change it to gibberish, or assign it to Richard Nixon. Or he might add new features to the central computer’s program—little subroutines that amuse him or somehow benefit him. For instance, in one of the more elegant so-called computer crimes, someone as yet unidentified got into one of the big electric company computers and persuaded it that every time it rounded off to the nearest cent, it should drop the remainder in his bank account. Three million half pennies a month—that’s not bad pay for maybe twenty minutes’ work.”
“They happen often, these ‘so-called computer crimes’?”
“Nobody really knows. According to the FBI, about one percent get reported; I imagine that’s just about right.”
“And they pay pretty well, you say?”
“I read somewhere a while ago that in the average burglary, the take is $42.50, and with the average bank robbery the take is about $3,500. In the average computer crime—this is just in the one percent reported, within which one percent almost nobody gets caught—the take is $500,000.”
“That makes it very tempting. You ever thought of it yourself, Professor?”
“Naturally. Show me a first-rate computer man who tells you he hasn’t and I’ll show you a liar. I worked as a teller in a bank, years ago. We used to talk all through lunch about ways of stealing money—tellers, bookkeepers, even junior officers. We thought of some really foolproof schemes, but none of us ever took a nickel, so far as I know. It’s a matter of personality, motivation—satisfaction with your work, how your personal life’s going …”
“How much would I have to know to commit a computer crime?” “That’s hard to say. It’s as much a matter of native intelligence as it is your knowledge of handshakes or math or computer languages. I can tell you this: everyone down here except a few of the programmers could handle it.”
“Could Ira Katz?”
“I think he’d have to have help. That’s just a guess.”
“I assume you’re granting him native intelligence.”
“No question. But I think he worked with others, mainly. More a concept man than a hacker.”
“Mmm. A minute ago you said—” Craine paused, studied his pad. “I may have gotten lost, but let me ask you this anyway. A minute ago you said there are two ways computers can mess up reality. One of them you’ve talked about, how computers can change things that happen in the world—how in fact they can become so integral to what happens that they can no longer be, you might say, factored out.”
“Exactly. In the new world they’ve helped create, they’re a vital organ. Shut them down and you shut down the civilization.”
“I understand that, I think. Tell me the second point—how computers intercede, I think you said, between human beings and the world.”
“Something like this. It’s oversimplified, but it will give you the idea. What people think, generally, is that the computer does what the programmer tells it to, and since it’s locked in to effective procedures, it can never go wrong. That’s not exactly true. The truth is more nearly that the man at the console has very little notion of what’s going on in the mind of the computer. He sees lights flash on and off, and he knows it’s thinking something, but he has no idea what; in fact vast hunks of the computer’s thinking go on between blinks, not in the central routine of the computer but somewhere in the miles and miles of shadow.”
“I’m not following.”
“No, right. Look. I mentioned routines. Say we have a standard routine—that is a set of algorithmic instructions—for adding numbers. Now say one of the numbers to be added is √25. You can’t add square roots in with ordinary numbers, so when we get to √25 we have to stop ad
ding—step out of the main routine, so to speak—and move to a different routine, call it a subroutine, which is designed to do nothing but figure out square roots. The subroutine rumbles along, off by itself, until it figures out that √25 = 5, at which point we ‘leave’ the subroutine and reenter the routine. This detour has taken us, on a slow computer, maybe a millionth of a second. So we’re clear now on routines and subroutines, right?
“All right. All these subroutines you keep in the computer—they’re part of its methodological memory, one of many kinds of memory. In a really complicated mathematical problem you might leave the routine and enter some sub or sub-sub or sub-sub-sub routine a hundred, two hundred, a thousand times. How does one man, in a single lifetime, program them all in, you ask me? The answer is, he doesn’t—and therein lies a tale.
“It’s a community effort, like the evolution of the universe. One programmer puts in the routine for square roots. Another, another day, puts in the routine for quadratic equations. Still another, another day—and so on and so on, generation on generation. The computer’s gifts and capabilities grow. Not only mathematicians make use of it but also demographers, physicists, psychologists, chess players. The computer begins to make decisions for itself—decisions we’re not even aware that it’s making. For example: I program in simultaneous play, at random intervals, of two games simultaneously—chess and pinochle. Sooner or later the call for a chess move and a pinochle move will coincide, and the computer will have to decide, if it can, which move to make first, chess or pinochle. Does the computer jam? go crazy? As it happens, it does not. Some sociologist happens to have left in it—maybe years ago—a formula stating that chess is a game of the upper class, pinochle a game of the lower class, and another formula, or symbolic statement, to be more precise—maintaining that the lower class tends to imitate the upper: so the computer plays the chess piece first.