The Thinktank That Leaked

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  I said, “That’s Wombles, not Muppets.”

  “You are the one for scientific accuracy, aren’t you? He hooked me up, and my personality profile shot down his patent plug-hole … and promptly got lost.”

  “Perhaps you haven’t got one.”

  “A personality? This isn’t one of your kinder moments, Roger.”

  “I’m wet.”

  “Then I got it back, Roger.”

  “How?”

  “It talked its way down my telephone.”

  2

  I let a week slip by before I took any further action. I didn’t know that I couldn’t afford this delay.

  Let me try and express my state of mind at that point, as clearly as I remember it. For in the light of recent events it may seem odd that I didn’t do much more a lot earlier. Hindsight always makes one look like a halfwit. Well, no excuses. Perhaps I was.

  However, in my defence I can say this: I could see, clearly enough, a perfectly logical explanation of how and why my ex-wife’s ‘personality profile’ — a loathsome phrase, surely? — got back to her in the way it did. Voice output from processed data is commonplace nowadays; and the only reason it isn’t used more often is because it’s expensive and usually quite unnecessary.

  Paula said the data relating to her personality got lost in the system. This happens — or appears to happen — at times because the moment in time when a computer finds it convenient to come up with an answer is determined by the priority assigned to that particular job. It would be hard — even for a computer — to regard Paula’s prosaic personality as being a matter of any urgency … even if she did come out of the top drawer in the purely social sense.

  Priorities within computers are usually managed automatically; and the means whereby an answer can be given comprise one of the most important aspects of this management; for the machine can do its sums a great deal faster than it can communicate its findings to anything or anyone else. If the machine is clogged with high priority work (the master computer at Manchester had, among other things, a huge volume of military and social-services documentation to get through regularly) it is designed to seek the best way of relieving itself of stored information so that it is free to accept some more.

  If Dr. Spender habitually kept his installation at the college switched off for lengthy periods (it had been dead when we’d entered his den after leaving the Common Room) the information relating to Paula couldn’t be spooled-off that way. I could only suppose that in its exasperation the Manchester machine had ‘looked-up’ Paula’s phone number in the current, digitized London directory or had got it direct from the data Dr. Spender had put in. He seemed pretty indiscreet; so he might well have included — for all I know — the state of her bank balance or membership of the Communist party (rather unlikely in her case) along with her telephone number as well.

  Not to be outdone, the computer had accordingly accessed a voice-output device and spewed it down Paula’s telephone line … which only goes to show how green I was as that stage about the real nature of the hook-up as it was by then.

  If I behaved like a thickhead it was because I was soaked in Computer Science and unresponsive to the implications of something far deeper than my mind was capable of penetrating. So I left things as they were, continued to pack up my files at the College, and enjoyed myself with a bit of pleasure flying.

  On the Wednesday I booked the Grumman trainer for an hour and I am quite sure that nothing and no one could have been further from my mind than the luckless Mike Crabtree, a youngster who had reportedly been mentally ill to an alarming degree, had absconded from psychiatric treatment — patents pending — yet was nevertheless fully cleared for solo flying.

  And as things turned out, I certainly needn’t have wrestled with my conscience regarding the justification, or otherwise, for illicitly gleaning information from any computer about the state of Mike Crabtree’s mind.

  We almost met, on collision course, at nine hundred feet over Elstree, in brilliant sunshine.

  I didn’t know in that hair’s-breadth second that it was Mike who was in the Chipmunk. I just have a permanent image in my mind concerning an instantaneous and impromptu glimpse of a tailplane and rudder about to shear off my starboard wing.

  The battered old Chipmunk was evidently on final approach, on a westerly heading for the runway. I had called the tower and got clearance to land; Crabtree had remained mute. I had turned onto finals and was setting flaps when it happened … flashing in the sunlight, an oblique-angled close-up of an aeroplane impossibly close to mine.

  I slammed the controls hard forward with the control wheel hard right and my foot trying to kick the rudder pedal through the floorboards. At the same time I put on full power and recited an extremely short prayer which was not phrased as it would have been in Church. ‘God get me out of this shit!’ Is not a Collect available in the Church of England Prayer Book; nor is it procedurally part of the normal syntax used on the radio between an aircraft and Air Traffic Control. But it went out on the air loud and clear as I watched the Chippie miss my starboard wing by a margin I prefer not to discuss here.

  Elstree tower came back with this masterpiece of understatement: “Is someone unhappy up there?”

  I said, in a sort of choked calm: “Bravo-Delta, overshooting for a fresh approach. Climbing and turning left for left hand circuit, Runway Two-Seven.”

  “Roger.”

  “And reporting an air miss. Who’s in that bloody Chipmunk?”

  “We’d better discuss that on the ground.”

  I said, “I can’t wait. Did the silly bastard get down?”

  “In a kind of sort of a way.”

  I said, “Please ensure he doesn’t backtrack down the runway or menace anyone who’s trying to get airborne.”

  “Roger, Bravo-Delta. And you are number one to land. QFE 1010, surface wind one-nine-zero at seven knots.”

  “Roger. Out.”

  At three hundred feet I got the flaps up, then steepened the turn to the left. This time I made a meal of it because my adrenalin was high and I felt at concert pitch. I gazed down the port wing and made it pivot exactly on a point far below, going around an imaginary ripek. I got through the downwind checks carefully but fast and switched tanks. Then I glanced down at the tower.

  The Chipmunk had parked. Someone had come out of the tower and just as the Chippie’s pilot stepped out a conversation of some heat evidently erupted because there was a good deal of gesticulating going on. I had to grin, not because some bum pilot was getting his own, but because he wasn’t up here and I was therefore safe. I could enjoy my aeroplane and fly accurately …

  “Bravo-Delta on finals.”

  “Roger. Can you spare us a minute in the tower when you get down?”

  “Will do.”

  The sun sheened off the metalwork of a white MG that had just pulled in through the airfield gates. A girl got out. She wore jeans almost as white as the MG except she had symmetrical oil patches on her seat. She wandered into the club room and I decided to make my conversation in the tower rather a short one.

  The runway was coming up nicely and I put on full flap and adjusted the throttle. I kept the nose slightly left of the centre line to offset the crosswind and found myself a comfortable fifteen feet over the threshold line of the runway as the swish of the wings changed slightly at the altered angle of attack as I eased back for flare-out. The girl with the oil-patched jeans appeared at the clubroom window and I realized I was showing off. At the exact right moment I gave the Grumman a gentle taste of right rudder and found myself precisely over the centre line as I touched. I couldn’t even hear the squeak as the tyres rolled and I felt like a schoolboy playing toy aeroplanes.

  Five minutes later I had the aircraft parked and I went up the steps of the tower.

  The controller on duty, a young man with a shock of fair hair and rather an exalted opinion of his own importance, started to make an unnecessary drama out of an event which I h
ad already half forgotten. In one corner on my side of the counter-top was a sullen-looking young man who was white and shaking — clearly the pilot who had so nearly hit me but I was surprised at finding him in such bad shape since he hadn’t even seen me up there and couldn’t possibly realize how close to death he’d been, such a short time ago. In the middle of the Controller’s monologue he asked if he could use the internal phone as he wanted to speak to someone in the clubroom. In my fury I still didn’t recognize him.

  The controller said curtly, “Why can’t you just walk through?”

  The youngster said, “I … I feel a bit shaken.”

  “All right. Use the phone.” A phone was shoved at him, then the controller turned back to me. “You were lucky, Mr. Kepter.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “And you weren’t looking, either.”

  “It’s a bit difficult to see through sheet metal.”

  “Did you do a standard turn?”

  “What’s your idea of a standard turn?”

  “I was watching you after you did the overshoot. You were doing steep turns.”

  “After making sure I was nowhere near anyone else, yes.”

  “If you did a turn like that onto finals the first time you tried to come in, someone looking into the sun would have found it hard to see you.”

  “True. But you’d told me I was number one to land and I had clearance for finals.”

  The young man in the chair hung up, then rose to his feet shakily. He asked, “Have you finished with me?”

  The Controller said, “Yes, you can go.”

  “I’ll be in the clubroom.”

  “You can go to the moon as far as I’m concerned. Only make sure you call them by radio first.” To me he said, “You realize we have a lot of trainee pilots on this circuit?”

  I said, “What’s eating you? Nerves? I’m the one who should be nervous. I could have got killed up there. Nearly did. So did the chap in the Chippie. So why not simmer down and be thankful that I got out of the way in time?”

  He grinned suddenly. “You should have heard the bollocking I gave Crabtree.”

  I cut back my reaction. Of course it wasn’t until this point that I twigged it was Crabtree who nearly hit me. I said quietly, “It takes two to cause an accident.”

  “I’m glad you realize it.” He relented and went back to the radio as some incoming aircraft called him. “Still, there evidently wasn’t much you could have done about anticipating Crabtree’s brand of manoeuvring. Just remember we have a few Crabtrees at this place. Take it easy.”

  I clanged down the metal steps and walked briskly for the clubroom. I wished to start a more affable investigation: who was the promising-looking owner of the MG?

  I was soon to know. The girl looked furiously in my direction and nodded pointedly toward a corner beyond the bar. She had been sitting with Mike Crabtree. She brusquely told him to wait where he was, then strode over to me.

  I like the way she walked, even when enraged. I was startled at the evident fact that Crabtree had landed himself a bird of such quality and felt a bit let down. But the situation soon became clearer. She said, flat, “You just got my brother into a lot of trouble.”

  “Your brother. Mike Crabtree is your brother?”

  “Yes. You know him?”

  “I’ve seen him around here and I know he has … problems.”

  “Then you must know he’s in no condition to be victimized by that conceited young upstart who likes to call himself a controller.”

  “Miss Crabtree, do you fly?”

  “Yes, a bit.”

  “Have you any idea what happened up there?”

  “Yes, you cut up my brother.”

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “Well, I …”

  “Miss Crabtree, I saw you arrive in your car after I’d executed an enforced overshoot. Like most drivers who wish to stay alive, you appeared to be looking where you were going. I think it unlikely that you saw what happened at nearly a thousand feet almost exactly overhead of where you must have been at the time. Perhaps you should tell your brother — however gently — that he, too, should look where he’s going — if he wants to stay alive. Or does he want to stay alive?”

  “He won’t much longer if everyone wants to chew him up.”

  “He’s chewing himself up. Do you really think he ought to be flying?”

  “Is that any business of yours?”

  “Miss Crabtree, loyalty taken to extremes can be self-defeating.”

  “What do you mean by that, exactly?”

  “I think you know.”

  She flicked her hair slightly. “You’re trying to tell me that in some way you’re on his side. I’m sorry I said that.”

  We both jerked our eyes to the window as some novice took off in an eccentric effort to reach the sky before time. He made it — somehow — and we looked at each other again.

  As a lecturer it was inevitable that I was used to talking to young women. I was used to the prettiest and I’m ashamed to say that some of us in the Common Room often referred to the Top Thirty. But though educated they were frequently mindless in a way I feel it difficult to define.

  I’d met no one at the college like the girl I was confronted with now. Though on the surface we were doing battle over her brother there was such an intense atmosphere between us on another level that instead of thinking out what I said I found myself listening to the both of us as if the conversation itself was almost irrelevant.

  That she was rivetingly attractive had been obvious at first sight. Less obvious was why she affected me so profoundly and what it was about her that was doing it. You can speak of quality all you like; but everyone has their own idea of quality. All I knew was that I couldn’t remember ever having felt so alive and alert as I suddenly was then.

  The truce in the argument lasted only a few seconds. In that time there came a change in my metabolic rate. I was so taken by surprise by this change that I felt abruptly defenceless. I remember wondering whether she would capitalize on this, sensing it, and go for a kill.

  She did not. She used the truce not to buckle my confidence but to sustain it. She said, “Perhaps I needed to talk to you. There was something awry about Mike’s version of that incident.”

  “He doesn’t want to lose face with his sister,” I said.

  “Would you?”

  “That would depend on the sister. He obviously thinks a lot of you. No doubt he has his reasons.” My eyes were on her lips and she knew it. They parted a little; then the truce was over. I offered her a drink.

  She said crisply, “Make it an orange juice. I’m flying in a few minutes but there’s a mechanical fault on the aircraft I booked. It may take time.”

  “Solo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you a safe pilot?”

  “It depends on who else is there to get in the way.”

  “I was suggesting,” I said, holding back my temper, “that you might as well take mine. You’re learning in Grumman trainers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, listen. I want an opportunity to talk to your brother … Don’t worry, I shan’t mention the incident. I’ll drive him home in the MG — my car’s in for servicing — then bring your car back here. You take my aeroplane and have fun. How’s that?”

  “Sounds okay. I’ll pay for the fuel, though. Why do you want to talk to Mike?”

  I said, “You must know he’s been discussing me with … people.”

  “Oh yes, Dr. Spender. And you call him people?”

  “I’m reserving my judgement.”

  She watched me over the orange juice. “You might do the same over Mike.”

  “I’ll try. But he shouldn’t lie about flying incidents — even to his sister.”

  “He’s scared. He’ll talk sense when he’s had time to get his breath back.”

  “Maybe. But you shouldn’t take everything he says as gospel if you’re really concerned about protecti
ng him.”

  “From what, Mr. Kepter?”

  “I don’t know, yet.”

  “So you have discussed him with Dr. Spender?”

  “No. Dr. Spender discussed him with me.”

  “Rather indiscreet.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Which is your Grumman?”

  “Bravo-Delta. Parked four down, over there.”

  “Does it get up to any tricks?”

  “Not when I’m in it, Miss Crabtree.”

  “The name is Nesta.”

  “Good name.”

  She said, “Don’t have an episode with the MG.”

  *

  He said, “Sorry I was so ham-handed, up there. And I’m afraid I didn’t tell Nesta the truth.”

  I said, “I’ll bet you don’t normally fly like that, do you? — So where are we heading?”

  “Notting Hill Gate. Do you mind going that far? You could drop me off at the tube if you like.”

  “It’s okay.”

  I drove quite a long way in silence. I was trying to weigh him up. Till then, I had taken him for granted simply as a student.

  I was in the company of a youth of about nineteen or twenty. He didn’t look weak; for that matter he didn’t look ill. It was something different. I’ve known many weak students; after a bit of practice you can spot them at a hundred yards. There’s something defeatist about the way they walk. I always find it indescribably sad; because you can see the failure of their childhood right the way back. They have never had any fun out of life, they’ve seen and heard dark things, they’ve been pushed around by some paunched father or a mother with a biting tongue, or a school where the bullying prevails and no one cares. I never succeed in helping them, so I pass the buck.

  But I never passed a single case to Spender.

  Mike was different. I got the vivid impression that he had somehow been shut up in a box — not early in life, where all the damage is done, but fairly recently. Endogenous depression? — Well, I don’t know anything about mental illness. Why was he with Spender in the first place? I’d never seen anything more normal or wholesome as his sister in my life. How could they be so different? Or were they all that different, where it really mattered?