The Thinktank That Leaked Read online

  Nesta said, “Daddy, this is Roger Kepter.”

  “I haven’t a great deal of time, Mr. Kepter. Don’t think me rude, but I have a meeting shortly. Could you keep it brief?”

  “You have a Dr. Richter here, I believe, on your research staff?”

  “And you want to see him. What about?”

  I said, “I’m afraid it would take far too much of your time to explain.”

  Lee Crabtree did not like getting caught in his own traps. “Does it concern this company?”

  “I don’t know for certain.” — I’d deliberately left the contaminated telephone receiver in the MG. The last thing I wanted was any tangible clue to the line of my enquiry.

  “I don’t understand you, Kepter. You must know whether you are discussing one of my products or not. Richter is one of my key researchers. I can’t spare him unless I know that your business is relevant to my operations.”

  Nesta said, “Daddy, for heavens sake! We flew here from Somerset because the … the situation is so urgent.”

  “Somerset … Ah, Spender’s place, I suppose you mean. I fail to see how the activities of that charlatan can possibly interest Richter. The bloody man practically wrecked my son’s health.”

  I said, “On that point we are entirely unanimous.”

  Lee looked at me sharply. He was surprised at my tone and was trying to check whether I was sincere. It was as if the last thing he had expected of any friend of his daughter’s was a point in common. He said, “How dangerous is Spender?”

  “About as dangerous as you can get.”

  Lee Crabtree got up. He was surprisingly short — and rather dumpy, like a Dickensian character who’d come up in the world. Lee walked to a fireplace where there was no fire and said to Nesta, “What took you down there, anyway? Mike is out of there, thank God, and I would have thought that was the end of it.” He added, as if I myself were suddenly not present: “I must say I was quite surprised that Mike had the spine to discharge himself.”

  Nesta nerved herself to contradict him: “Mike has more spine than you seem to think, Daddy.”

  “Then it isn’t very conspicuous.” Back to me: “How did you come across this Dr. Spender?”

  “We are at the same college.”

  Nesta said, “Roger Kepter is a lecturer there.”

  Lee said, like a senior policeman ticking off an item, “But you’re not a Ph.D.”

  Nesta said, “Not yet.”

  Lee turned and looked at here, detecting a note a sight too possessive for his liking. He said, “It is probable that Mr. Kepter can speak for himself.”

  I said, turning on a bit more heat, “I can certainly try. Dr. Spender chose to use a form of information processing on his patients — including your son — the therapeutic value of which is, to say the least, open to speculation. The dangers of using it outweigh by a very considerable margin any value there might be in Spender’s methods even if they worked. A situation has arisen where only a company of this standing and only a specialist of Dr. Richter’s ability can hope to evaluate what is really going on.”

  Lee said not a word to this, but walked to his desk and lit a cigarette as if he were really thinking of something else. There was something curiously clumsy about the way Lee Crabtree handled the desk lighter. It wasn’t so much that he seemed slightly drunk; it was more an impression I got that he continually expected things to be unpredictable. The cigarette looked small and out of place between the man’s lips. “I am not clear,” he said, “how you came to meet Nesta.”

  I indulged a slight fabrication. “I was following up on some rather questionable conclusions Spender had leapt to regarding your son — especially as an aviator.”

  Lee seemed relieved at being able to fill in a fact for himself. Momentarily his manner became affable and As One with me. “So you and Nesta and Mike all belong to the same flying club? — And you used that fact to pursue the problem?”

  “Yes.”

  Nesta said, “Roger has been helping me get Mike back on his feet.”

  This remark earned us both a glance that wasn’t hard to interpret. Nesta knew she’d made a mistake — leaping to my protection in this way sounded too cosy. But Lee seemed to file the issue away for attention at some later date.

  The next thing he said really did shock me. It was if he hadn’t hurt his daughter nearly enough during one exposure. But there was something more to it, even, than that. Persisting in the practice of somehow saying several things at once — commenting on Nesta’s relationship with me in the context of what he actually came out with — he said, “Nesta, that pilot friend of yours in Switzerland … I think you should know: he killed himself.”

  She looked at me, then back at him, couldn’t say anything.

  Lee went on, “I suppose you thought I knew nothing about him. Am I right?”

  “How did he die?”

  “He crashed … There was some kind of a scene before he took off — alone — in a light aeroplane. He could have been flying you, Nesta. You’re lucky.”

  I’d never seen Nesta stand so still. “What do you mean, a ‘scene’?”

  “It appears he had some kind of fit. They tried to prevent him taking off. They did not succeed.”

  She said, “You’re enjoying telling me this.”

  “I’m just very relieved you weren’t available for the flight in question.”

  “I don’t see how you know about it, Daddy. Was it in the papers?”

  His thick lips extended further across his face, curving neither upward nor downward. “My Geneva Office took strenuous measures to keep it out of the press as neither they nor I wished your name to come up.”

  Nesta said flatly, “Then I hope some other good friends of his who did know about the accident were allowed to associate their names with him.”

  Lee said, “That I don’t know. But I choose to assume that they at least knew more about their unfortunate friend than — it is evident — you did.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that during this so-called ‘fit’ he screamed such appalling abuse and hatred, piling obscenity upon obscenity until those who were trying to prevent the flight didn’t really care whether he killed himself in that aeroplane or not. No colleague of mine can bring himself to repeat what he said and some of it, Nesta, directly concerned you.”

  Nesta’s mouth barely moved. “You said ‘hatred’?”

  Lee said, “The word is scarcely adequate, but that is what I said.”

  Nesta looked across at me. I could see the appalled set of conflicting emotions that now expressed themselves in her eyes. She could convey conflict in them as articulately as her father telegraphed such malice in the set of his mouth. Lee, eyes opaque and withdrawn, turned back to me. It was as if he’d pressed the ‘Clear’ button of a calculator and resumed fresh arithmetic. “Mr. Kepter, I’ve no objection to your seeing Dr. Richter but when I have time I shall, of course, ask Richter what it’s all about. I myself have a meeting now; but my secretary will show you both down to the Product Development Wing.” He rang for her. Then he glanced up at Nesta with those smeary-looking eyes. “I would be grateful if you would find the time to visit me at The Anchors within the next few days, Nesta. There are … certain … matters I wish to discuss with you privately.”

  “I’ll try, Daddy.”

  “And you shall succeed.” This was said with a smile. It conveyed a very complex set of emotions but none of them were humorous.

  Mercifully, we were left alone together in Lee’s office prior to his secretary’s appearance.

  “Roger, why can’t I cry? Don’t you realize —”

  “I realize exactly the same things as you do.”

  “I said terrible things about him. To you. Ungrateful things.”

  “Nesta. How could you know?”

  “You look so angry.”

  “No. I’m being ‘fierce’ — as you once put it. I’ll tell you for why, and it’s going to sound selfish. Yo
u can’t be in love with two people at once and you can’t regard your pilot friend so much as an ex-lover as a human clue in a terrifying situation.”

  “That would be inhumane, Roger, except that you don’t mean it.”

  “It’s inhumane and I do mean it. We’ve been over your love affair with that chap in the light of what we didn’t know when we discussed it and what you certainly couldn’t have known when you were with him. You played a part — an important part, I believe, in his life and he did in yours. As far as you could know, it was a human relationship that eventually ended. The reason you can’t cry is that you know inside yourself that you can have nothing to reproach yourself for in what you said or felt or thought. Added to that is the fact that you are suffering from one sort of shock which is superimposed on another sort of shock and you can’t react —”

  “— Damn you! Do you have to be so mercilessly scientific?”

  “Yes, if it’s valid. It was in your eyes. We don’t know very much yet but we know enough to guess a few things. It’s unmistakable.”

  “Hate.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does that mean he hated me all along?”

  “You’re doing your level best to miss the point, Nesta. I was convinced — when you first told me about him in the car, that first day — that in his own way he loved you. I think I also convinced you that he wasn’t being destructive.”

  “Yes. You did.”

  “What was hating you when he had that fit was not him. You know that: there’s no need for me to say it … If you care about the memory of the man you must care about the threatened humanity he represented. There’s no time for emotion over something you couldn’t possibly control …”

  At that point Lee’s secretary, very uptight, came in and told us that Dr. Richter would be able to see us in a few minutes, had we something to do for half an hour or so?

  I welcomed the opportunity to get Nesta the hell out of her father’s office. Lee was just plain nasty in his own right and I didn’t like the smell of his room.

  So Nesta and I went out to the car and she did a bit of crying and that helped. And in the car was that filthy thing wrapped in Cellophane and it had an effect on Nesta’s mood after a while, because it was impossible to ignore its significance in connection with what Lee had told us and this significance had its effect on Nesta’s emotions because she knew that we neither of us could view the tragedy in any normal perspective; we were involved in some kind of abhorrent war and there were others — including ourselves — to defend.

  “What do you think of my father?”

  “He’s a shit.”

  She’d recovered and had opened the car door her side. “How did he know?”

  “Either he’d been spying on you in Geneva all along, via the Geneva subsidiary, or —”

  “ — Or what?”

  “Never forget: We’re dealing with an information system.”

  She said, “Don’t forget your … parcel.”

  *

  I’d never met Richter but he was a delight. Leaping about like a twenty-year old and talking eighteen to the dozen, he used words with gusto and meaning; and flashed an occasional smile when there was time between rapidly uttered sentences. If he were a machine gun he would have fired chocolate bullets. I’ve never known a man — least of all of his age — with such clarity of vision and such impetuous, dancing eyes. He adored Nesta on sight and certainly made no effort to conceal it. “… Clearly, this is my day. Are you a laser-created hologram or are you really There?” He rested a huge hand on her head. “Tangible … You never know, these days. Who’s this ridiculously lucky man? He even seems jealous of me, at my age!”

  I said, “I’m Roger Kepter.”

  “That’s no excuse. I could spend an entire afternoon at Kew Gardens and never hope to come back with anything approaching Miss Hologram.”

  Nesta said, “The hologram’s name is Nesta. Nesta Crabtree.”

  This silenced even Richter for a second or two. But he swallowed the pill implied by her second name by metaphorically killing the taste with something more effervescent. It was obvious, though, what he thought of Lee Crabtree. He gabbled on and the smile returned irrepressibly. “Miss Crabtree, sit over there, and I shall have coffee brought.” He buzzed and his secretary appeared. There wasn’t much wrong with her, either. “Evelyn, bring coffee for three. And that cake. You know the cake I mean?”

  Evelyn said, “I know precisely the cake you mean.”

  She left to carry out the order and Richter explained, “You may not believe it, but my Monthly Cake comes by Aeroflot. I have a daughter in Moscow and her boyfriend is with Customs. Therefore, Cake.” He yanked open a drawer and produced a colour photograph. “There. Would you have thought she could bake such cakes?”

  The girl depicted was a knockout. She had her father’s humour and an erect, proud body and an air of rather secretive thoughtfulness, like someone who had discovered all the secrets of the universe in her back yard. Richter said, “Her mother’s dead, but she looked the same.”

  I said, “You obviously know your way around Kew Gardens.”

  There was just time for Richter to flash me a lightning smile before he changed the subject. “What can I do for you? …”

  *

  The impression I have now of that crucial day spent at S.E.C. (Standard Electric Computers) is one of calm, cold vivisection of sheer, undiluted catastrophe. In fact it was Thom’s unique Catastrophe Theorem that supplied the model. On this Richter showed quite conclusively that this apocalypse amounted to the unveiling of an inevitable and predicted upward surge in the spontaneous evolution of information technology.

  Yet not once — even after we’d retired to the laboratory section and had talked and worked far into the night — not once did Richter raise his voice or depart from a cool, controlled approach to a systematic analysis that at times irritated me when I felt like interrupting everything and yelling at him to admit to the horror of what he had found.

  Funny Cakes had long since been forgotten when, at last, he switched off the electron microscope and had got himself comfortably seated in a swivel chair. I remember, as a backdrop to this, only the quiet hum of research equipment and the almost indiscernible swish of air conditioning. Most of the lights were switched off. Nesta, Joseph Richter and myself shared an isolated vignette of light in one corner of Lab B. We had been drinking only the iced water from the globbing dispenser near the lockers. The time was eleven-thirty at night and, apart from the night security people, the rest of the building was deserted.

  Richter still spoke in that percussive, precision style despite his exhaustion.

  Only this time he was not smiling.

  “What you have stumbled on is a process that was discovered by accident in the Soviet Union about two years ago. I heard about it, though very sketchily, through indirect channels which we needn’t discuss. The experiments carried out were conducted in a sealed, isolated establishment in Siberia and were quickly aborted the moment it was realized that, once unleashed and allowed to spread, the phenomenon would run very rapidly out of control.” He looked up at us; and I shall never forget the strained, tautened expression on his face. Elderly as he was, not a crease or a line showed on his complexion because every muscle in it had drawn the skin in tight. “In the USSR this process is known as Electronic Cancer.”

  I felt my own lips move. “And now I’ve given it to Nesta.” Bitterly I added, “And there is no such thing as a Kissing Machine. I was just utterly irresponsible.”

  Nesta said fiercely, “That’s just not true.”

  Richter said, “It’s not true.” He spoke very fast and crisply. “It is typical in a catastrophe situation that the mechanisms for love are used as a means of spreading hate. We will deal with the means we can place at our disposal for the dispersing of crystals within the tissue both of you two and any others affected. I have contacts in Russia who will have researched this and other aspects of the crisis a
nd no time will be wasted in assembling the information so far collated. Meanwhile there are points to cover which I’ll just go over before we agree on what to do.”

  Richter lit his first and only cigarette of that day and sat back and was able — amazingly — to relax. I realized that this was no gift; it arose from absolute concentration. The fact that he was applying his whole brain to the emergency meant that he could drain the tension from his body and emotions and use them as motive-force for problem-solving.

  “Point One: Whatever you think of Spender, he had a perfectly valid idea. In an effort to protect other people and prevent human beings who harboured hate from harming other individuals he sought a channel whereby hatred could be extracted from each patient and dumped. Unfortunately he doesn’t know enough about information processing — as it now stands — and made matters worse instead of better by letting hatred get absorbed into a very efficient system both of amplifying it and spreading it. Just how he got to know about what has been described as ‘a crystal mosaic’ is not clear. But he is not the enemy.

  “Point Two: You were inspired, Mr. Kepter, perhaps I should call you Roger, it is quite evident that we are going to get to know each other very well and very rapidly from now on … you were inspired in supposing that a virus is used in the process as an agent or catalyst both for the dissemination and reconfiguration of each crystal-community but quite misguided in assuming that the viruses become active while still crystalline. The rules of scientific games have not been broken even by this monster. What occurs is that heat is sporadically generated within a suitable organic ‘soup’ or colloid, just for a few seconds at a time. During these few seconds the viruses change from their crystalline state to their active state, do the work assigned to them, then re-crystallize. This must be so anyway because no Kissing Machine of the sort you describe, Roger — an attractive but partially subjugated female — could retransmit crystals picked up at her ears via this” — he indicated the contaminated telephone receiver that I had retrieved from Nesta’s car — “and then pass them on via her lips to someone else. Clearly an organic structure exists in her membrane in which alerted viruses are able to move large molecules or groups of molecules in circumstances of warmth and moisture.