The Tightrope Men / The Enemy (47 page)

Ogilvie said, ‘Which computer?’

‘One in the City; a time-sharing system.’

Ogilvie looked at me. ‘Oh, we can’t have that. I want everything you’ve put into that computer cleared out. We’ll put it in our own computer.’

I said quickly, ‘I wouldn’t do that. I don’t trust it. It lost Benson.’

Although Harrington could not know what we were talking about he caught the general drift. ‘That’s no problem.’ He pointed to the railway. ‘As a model railway that thing is very elaborate and complex, but as a computer it’s relatively simple. There’s nothing there that can’t be duplicated in the Hewlett-Packard desk-top job I have in my own office. But I’ll need a printer to handle Russian characters and, perhaps, a modified keyboard.’

Ogilvie said, ‘That’s a most satisfactory solution.’ He walked over to the railway and looked at it. ‘You’re right; it is complex. Now show me how it works.’

Harrington smiled. ‘I thought you’d ask that. Can you read Russian?’

Ogilvie indicated Larry. ‘We’ve brought an interpreter.’

‘I’m going to run through the program from the beginning; it’s set up ready. I want you to keep an eye on that marshalling yard there. When it’s full you can read it off because I’ve labelled each truck with the character it represents. I’ll stop the system at the right time.’

He switched on and the trains began to scurry about, and the marshalling yard, which was empty, began to fill up. Harrington stopped the system. ‘There you are.’

Ogilvie leaned forward and looked. ‘All right, Godwin, What does it say?’

Harrington handed Larry a small pair of opera glasses. ‘You’ll find these useful.’

Larry took them and focused on the trains. His lips moved silently but he said nothing, and Ogilvie demanded impatiently, ‘Well?’

‘As near as I can make out it says something like this: “First approximation using toroidal Legendre function of the first kind.”’

‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ said Ogilvie.

Later, back at the office, I said, ‘So they’re not going to use the railway.’

‘And better not,’ said Ogilvie. ‘We can’t wait two years to find out what this is all about.’

‘What will you do with it? According to Harrington it’s a pretty simple-minded computer. Without the schedules - the programs - it’s just an elaborate rich man’s toy.’

‘I don’t know what to do with it,’ said Ogilvie. ‘I’ll have to think about that.’

‘Do me a favour,’ I said. ‘Give it to Michaelis. It was he who figured those schedules were fakes. It’ll make his day.’

So Harrington put the programs on tape acceptable to his own computer and the Russian character printer began to spew out yards of Russian text and international figures. When Larry translated the Russian it proved to be oddly uninformative - brief notes on what the computer was doing at the time, but not why it was doing it. I mean, if you read a knitting pattern and find ‘knit 2, purl 1’, that doesn’t tell you if you’re knitting a body-belt for a midget or a sweater for your hulking Rugby-playing boy-friend. And that’s not really such a good analogy because if you’re knitting you know you’re knitting, while a computer program could be doing damned nearly anything from analysing the use of the subjunctive in Shakespeare’s
Titus Andronicus
to designing a trajectory for a space shot to Pluto. The field was wide open so a selection of assorted boffins was brought in.

All this was beyond me so I left them to it. I had other things on my mind, the principal one being that Penny had cabled me, saying that she was returning and giving her flight number and time of arrival at Heathrow. I felt a lot better immediately because it meant she expected me to meet her, and she wouldn’t have done it if her decision had not been in my favour.

When I met her she was tired. She had flown from Los Angeles to New York, stopped for a few hours only to see
Gillian, and then flown the Atlantic. She was suffering from jet lag and her stomach and glands were about nine hours out of kilter. I took her to the hotel where I had booked her a room; she appreciated that, not wanting to move into an empty flat with nothing in the refrigerator.

I joined her in a coffee before she retired to her room, and she told me that the operation on Gillian was going well and would I pass that message on to Michaelis. She smiled. ‘Gillian particularly wants him to know.’

I grinned. ‘We mustn’t hinder the marriage of true minds.’

She talked briefly about what she had been doing in California and of a visit to the Harvard School of Medical Studies. ‘They’re doing good work there with PV40,’ she said.

‘What’s that?’

‘A virus - harmless to human beings.’ She laughed. ‘I keep forgetting you’re not acquainted with the field.’

I said nothing to her about the model railway, although she would have to be told eventually. We couldn’t just expropriate the knowledge to be found there - whatever it was - although the legal position would seem to be confused. The department had bought it, but whether the information it held came under the Copyright Act or not was something to keep the lawyers happy for years. In any case it was for Ogilvie to make the decision.

But she had just said something that had jerked little man Hunch out of bed and he was yelling his head off. I said, ‘Did you talk over your work much with your father?’

‘All the time,’ she said.

‘It doesn’t seem a subject that would interest a man primarily versed in catalysts,’ I said casually. ‘Did he know much about it?’

‘Quite a lot,’ she said. ‘Daddy was a man with a wide range of interests. He made one or two suggestions which
really surprised Lummy when they worked in the laboratory.’ She finished her coffee. ‘I’m for bed. I feel I could sleep the clock around.’

I saw her to the lift, kissed her before she went up, then went back to the office at speed. Ogilvie wasn’t in, so I went to see Harrington and found him short-tempered and tending to be querulous. ‘The man who put these programs together was either quite mad or a genius. Either way we can’t make sense out of them.’

Harrington knew nothing about Ashton and I didn’t enlighten him beyond saying, ‘I think you can discount insanity. What can you tell me about the programs - as a whole?’

‘As a whole?’ He frowned. ‘Well, they seem to fall into two groups - a group of five and a group of seven. The group of seven is the later group.’

‘Later! How do you know?’

‘When we put them through the computer the last thing that comes out is a date. The first five seem to be totally unrelated to each other, but the group of seven appear to be linked in some way. They all use the same weird system of mathematics.’

I thought hard for some minutes and made a few calculations. ‘Let me guess. The first of the group of seven begins about 1971, and the whole lot covers a period finishing, say, about six months ago.’

‘Not bad,’ said Harrington. ‘You must know something I don’t.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I rather think I do.’

I sought Ogilvie again and found he had returned. He took one look at my face, and said, ‘You look like the cat that swallowed the canary. Why so smug?’

I grinned and sat down. ‘Do you remember the time we had a late night session trying to figure what Ashton would have been working on? We agreed he would keep on theorizing, but we couldn’t see what he could theorize about.’

‘I remember,’ said Ogilvie. ‘And I still can’t. What’s more, neither can Harrington and he’s actually working on the material itself.’

‘You said he wouldn’t be working in atomics because he hadn’t kept up with the field.’

‘He didn’t keep up in any field with the exception of catalytic chemistry, and there he was mainly reworking his old ideas - nothing new.’

‘You’re wrong,’ I said flatly.

‘I don’t see what he could have kept up in. We know the books he bought and read, and there was nothing.’

I said softly, ‘What about the books Penny bought?’

Ogilvie went quite still. ‘What are you getting at?’

‘Penny said something just before she went to the States which slipped right past me. We were talking about some of the complications of her work and most of it was over my head. We were in her home at the time, and she said she was so used to talking with her father in that room she’d forgotten I was a layman.’

‘The implication being that Ashton wasn’t?’

‘That’s it. It came up again just now and this time it clicked. I’ve just been talking to Harrington, and he tells me there’s a group of seven linked programs. I made an educated guess at the period they covered and I got it right first time. They started when Penny first began her graduate work in genetics. I think Ashton educated himself in genetics alongside his daughter. This morning Penny said he’d made suggestions which surprised Lumsden when they worked in the laboratory. Now, Penny works with Lumsden, one of the top men in the field. Everything he knew and learned she could pass on to Ashton. She read the relevant journals - and so did Ashton; she attended seminars and visited other laboratories - and passed everything back to Ashton. She could have been doing it quite unconsciously, glad to have someone near to her with whom she
could discuss her work. He was right in the middle of some of the most exciting developments in science this century, and I’m not discounting atomic physics. What’s more likely than that a man like Ashton should think and theorize about genetics?’

‘You’ve made your point,’ said Ogilvie. ‘But what to do about it?’

‘Penny must be brought in, of course.’

He shook his head. ‘Not immediately. I can’t make that decision off the cuff. The problem lies in the very fact that she
is
Ashton’s daughter. She’s intelligent enough to ask why her father should have considered it necessary to hide what he’s doing, and that, as the Americans say, opens up a can of worms, including his early history and how and why he died. I doubt if the Minister would relish an angry young woman laying siege to his office or, much worse, talking to newspaper reporters. I’ll have to ask him for a decision on this one.’

I said, ‘You can’t possibly suppress a thing like this.’

‘Who is talking about suppressing it?’ he said irritably. ‘I’m merely saying we’ll have to use tact in handling it. You’d better leave it with me. You haven’t said anything to her about it, have you?’

‘No.’

‘Good. You’ve done well on this, Malcolm. You’ll get the credit for it when the time comes.’

I wasn’t looking for credit, and I had an uneasy feeling that Ogilvie wasn’t being quite straight with me. It was the first time I had ever felt that about him, and I didn’t like it.

I saw Penny the following afternoon, by arrangement, at University College. As I walked down the corridor towards her office the door of Lumsden’s office opened and Cregar came out so that I had to sidestep smartly to avoid barging into him. He looked at me in astonishment and demanded, ‘What are you doing here?’

Apart from the fact that it wasn’t any of his business, I still felt sore enough at the roasting he had given me at the committee meeting to be inclined to give him a sharp answer. Instead I said, mildly enough, ‘Just visiting.’

‘That’s no answer.’

‘Perhaps that’s because I neither liked the question nor the way it was put.’

He boggled a bit then said, ‘You’re aware the Ashton case is closed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’ll have to ask you again - what are you doing here?’

I said deliberately, ‘The moon will turn into green cheese the day I have to ask your permission to visit my fiancée.’

‘Oh!’ he said inadequately. ‘I’d forgotten.’ I really think it had slipped his memory. Something in his eyes changed; belligerence gave way to speculation. ‘Sorry about that. Yes, you’re going to marry Dr Ashton, aren’t you?’

At that moment I didn’t know whether I was or not, but I wouldn’t give Cregar that satisfaction. ‘Yes, I am.’

‘When is the wedding to be?’

‘Soon, I hope.’

‘Ah, yes.’ He lowered his voice. ‘A word to the wise. You are aware, of course, that it would be most undesirable if Miss Ashton should ever know what happened in Sweden.’

‘Under the circumstances I’m the last person likely to tell her,’ I said bitterly.

‘Yes. A sad and strange business - very strange. I hope you’ll accept my apology for my rather abrupt manner just now. And I hope you’ll accept my good wishes for your future married life.’

‘Of course - and thank you.’

‘And now you must excuse me.’ He turned and went back into Lumsden’s office.

As I walked up the corridor I speculated on Cregar’s immediate assumption that my presence in University College was linked to the Ashton case. Granted that he had genuinely forgotten I was to marry Penny, then what possible link could there be?

I escorted Penny to Fortnum’s where she restocked her depleted larder. Most of the order was to be sent, but we took enough so that she could prepare a simple dinner for two. That evening, in the flat, as we started on the soup she said, ‘I’m going to Scotland tomorrow.’

‘With Lumsden?’

‘He’s busy and can’t come. The extra time I spent in America has thrown our schedule out a bit.’

‘When will you be back?’

‘I don’t think I’ll be away as much as a week. Why?’

‘There’s a new play starting at the Haymarket next Tuesday which I thought you might like to see. Alec Guinness. Shall I book seats?’

She thought for a moment. ‘I’ll be back by then. Yes, I’d like that I haven’t been in a theatre for God knows how long.’

‘Still having trouble in Scotland?’

‘It’s not really trouble. Just a difference of opinion.’

After dinner she made coffee, and said, ‘I know you don’t like brandy. There’s a bottle of scotch in the cabinet.’

I smiled. ‘That’s thoughtful of you.’

‘But I’ll have a brandy.’

I poured the drinks and took them over to the coffee table. She brought in the coffee, and then we sat together on the settee. She poured two black coffees, and said quietly, ‘When would you like us to get married, Malcolm?’

That was the night the new carpet became badly coffee-stained, and it was the night we went to bed together for the first time.

It had been quite long enough.