Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (32 page)

With Bill as agitated as he was, Susan and Turing left the house early. They stopped by the Big Bow Wow.

“I saw Vassar last night,” Susan announced. “You and I didn’t really get a chance to talk or teep yet today. Thanks to that wacko Burroughs.”

“He’s gone spare,” said Alan. “I fear I’m not enough for him. I’m a boring wonk. Not a writer.” Alan sighed and shook his head, crestfallen. “So what did Vassar tell you?”

“You’re not boring, Alan. You’re the archenemy. Give yourself some credit.”

“Archenemy?” said Alan, slightly puzzled. “Oh, you mean my skugs. I’ve started taking them for granted, rather.”

“World leaders
definitely
view you as the archenemy,” insisted Susan. “Anyway. The main thing Vassar told me is that LANL is building a bomb against the skugs in that canyon between here and the mesa where Ricky Red Dog lives. The V-bomb. Project Utopia.”

“Those lights we saw when we where lost in the storm,” mused Alan. “That was the bomb site. Why V-bomb? And how would
Burroughs
know?”

“Not sure about that,” said Susan. “At first I thought Burroughs had teeped the name from me. But there’s that vision he had when he was dead in Mexico. He saw something in heaven?”

“God knows all,” intoned Turing. “Very strange if any of that religious bosh proves out to be true.” As so many times before, he thought of his lost love Christopher Morcom. Safe in heaven dead? Waiting for him? For now, Alan himself was wearing Chris’s face.

“You better make your move on Ulam today,” said Susan, showing him the designer’s handwritten instructions again. “Make a plan, Alan. We can’t just be reacting to events. We have to get Hosty.”

“Dora said this was the code for a spherical shell?” asked Alan, looking at the instructions.

“Her very words,” said Susan, mopping up syrup with her last bit of French toast. She signaled the waitress for seconds.

“Presumably the shell is the shape of the charge they’re going to use in this new bomb,” said Alan. “This V-bomb. They’re simulating the explosion on the MANIAC. Trying to predict how it’ll behave. And if these particular handwritten instructions do all that…” His voice trailed off and he was quiet for a few minutes.

The clattering, humdrum diner faded away. Alan was where he most liked to be, in the land of pure abstractions. And now the answers came into his head. He understood how the computational patterns were tethered to the little knobs of the symbols. With wry amusement, he saw a simple way to throw a monkey-wrench into the MANIAC.

With his pen moving as rapidly and evenly as a mechanical plotter, Alan inscribed twelve lines of code on the back-side of Susan’s sheet of instructions. He read them over one, twice, three times. No margin for error.

“So you want me to punch these onto a tape?” asked Susan, in tight teep synch with him now.

“Right. And this first line ensures that when you feed the code into the reader, the signals go directly over to the MANIAC. Without printing out any intermediary tapes.”

“And then what?” asked Susan.

“I meet Ulam,” said Alan.

Sure enough, around three in the afternoon, the MANIAC went into a frenzy. Its lights flashed with rising intensity; its tape spools whined at a frenetic speed. So viciously crafted was Alan’s logic knot that Joe the engineer had to cut off the computer’s main power switch.

Five minutes later, Stan Ulam appeared. Like the other men, he wore a jacket and tie. He was nearly bald, with thoughtful wrinkles, a large nose, and a slight smile.

“What’s up, Joe? Why has the shit hit the fan?” Although Ulam had a noticeable Polish accent, he made the most of the American idioms he knew.

“A problem with the program, Stan,” said the skinny engineer at the controls. “I can’t quite nail it down. I fetched a copy of the program tape.”

Alan piped up from his stool beside the tube cabinets. “An endless loop, I’ll wager. A jump to a previous program point. An infinitely nested recursion.”

“Advice from the peanut gallery?” said Ulam, mildly amused. “Who do you think you are, Mr. Tube Tech?”

“I’m, ah, Peter Pfaff. I don’t have any formal degrees, but mathematics and computer science are hobbies of mine.”

“Computer science,” said Ulam, as if the phrase left a bad taste in his mouth. “A discipline that explicitly calls itself a science is a pretender. Social science. Political science. Military science. And car science for the grease monkeys in the garage.”

“Ah, but remember Turing’s use of the Halting Problem to solve Hilbert’s
Entscheidungsproblem
,” said Alan smoothly. “That’s science about computers, Dr. Ulam.”

“Your tube tech is speaking always this way?” said Ulam, turning to the two engineers at the controls. He held his hands stretched out to his sides like a comedian delivering a punch line.

“He only started here yesterday, Dr. Ulam,” said Joe, who was rapidly flipping through the MANIAC’s program tapes. “He never said anything at all so far.”

“There’s the glitch!” cried in the other engineer, who was looking at the paper tape over Joe’s shoulder “A bad jump and an endless loop.” He scowled at Alan. “Suspicious.”

“I made a simple deduction,” said Alan shrugging his shoulders. “I can’t help being clever.”

“Fix the program tape and restart the run,” Ulam told the engineers after a moment’s deliberation. “And call in a replacement for this tube tech. He’s off the job. And tell Dora to fire whoever it was who punched the bad tape. We are not needing practical jokers.” Ulam turned his intent gaze full upon Alan. His eyes were gray-green. “I want to talk to you in private. Come.”

Alan followed Ulam down a hall, not sure what was in store. The two of them took a seat on a couch at a bend of the passage, and Ulam asked Alan an escalating series of questions about maps in operator space, nonlinear wave equations, and the practical implementation of cellular automata upon computing machines. He seemed greatly to enjoy Alan’s answers, and when he was done, he beamed and patted Alan on the knee.

“I am hoping you’re not so intractable a spy that we have to execute you,” said Ulam. “I’m deeply in need of an intelligent person to talk with. No such individuals are working at LANL just now. Come, we’ll let the security men pick your bones.”

Alan had been through the security office for his clearance to be a tube tech. This time, however, he had to offer up his fingerprints, pose for two photos, and submit a blood test. Once more the agents scrutinized the Peter Pfaff ID that he’d grown from his stomach skin. So far as Alan knew, the real Peter and Polly Pfaff had finished their Bandelier day-trip and had moved on to gnarlier slopes by now. Good to have them out of the way. As before, Alan told the security he and Polly were lodging in the Cowboy Motel—and nobody checked. The security office wasn’t very well organized.

Meanwhile the FBI and the CIA sent background information on Peter Pfaff over the teletype—fortunately with no photos attached. Alan was still wearing Christopher Morcom’s face. Above all, Alan was grateful that they didn’t wheel in the skugsniffer. Apparently the security staff didn’t want the skugsniffer inside the secure zones of the lab.

“Can you rush the approval?” Ulam asked the security agent. “I would need Pfaff today and tomorrow.”

“Says here he’s been a folk singer,” said the fat agent, tapping his finger on one of the print-outs. “Questionable.”

“As you know, I’m chief scientist on Project Utopia,” said Ulam. “Crash priority. This colorful character’s input could be a key for keeping the project on time. I am taking my inspiration where I find it.”

“We’ll give him a temporary clearance,” said the security chief, unimpressed. “He’ll have to apply for an extension in three days.” With a flurry of paper-stamping, the man put together a new identity card.

“You are passing now to the inner sanctum,” said Ulam, hurrying Alan along. “We have a better cafeteria. Classified food. And now for my office. You can be yourself in here and talk freely. They are sweeping the place for bugs every week. Even the skugsniffer isn’t nosing in here.”

In Ulam’s lair, shelves of math and physics books filled one wall, with scores of journal reprints mixed in. A massively boxed cathode ray tube sat in a corner above a bank of switches and dials. A heavy wooden table held a fascinating collection of mechanical devices that Ulam must have cobbled together himself, very rough and handmade. A blackboard was bedecked with arcane formulae and odd diagrams. Alan’s idea of paradise.

Ulam picked up a gimmick the size of a shoebox, with a piston on one side and a pair of wooden mousetrap-style levers linked to eccentrically mounted gears.

“Can you make a wild guess what this is?” asked Ulam puckishly.

“A mockup for the initiator cascade of the hydrogen bomb,” said Alan after a moment’s hesitation. Ulam waggled his expressive eyebrows, impressed by Alan’s acumen.

And this was the moment when Alan’s inner skug could wait no more. A tendril shot out from his finger and into Ulam’s belly as if to skug him.

But the finger could find no purchase in Ulam’s flesh. The long extension shriveled to a wisp and dropped away, leaving as a stub—Alan’s original finger.

“I am vaccinated,” said Ulam. “Naturally. Like all of the higher-ups. I was of course suspecting you to be a skugger. Smelling a rat, no?”

Alan looked frantically around the windowless office. The only way out was through the door. Ulam would sound an alarm and the guards would be firing at him. As a skugger he was relatively immune to bullets—but if they had a flame-thrower, he was done for. If only he could make it outdoors, he’d change his form and find a way to slip away, perhaps as a snake beneath the snow. But—how odd—Ulam was simply standing there smiling at him.

“Aren’t you going to do anything?” Alan had to ask.

“Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer,” said Ulam. “Machiavelli. Who better to advise me on project Utopia than a skugger? If you can play along with me, Mr. Pfaff, there may be an opportunity to tell your fellows the details of our plan to exterminate all skuggers.”

“Why would you help us?” asked Alan, bewildered. “Why would you create a security leak?”

“I know the situation from both sides,” said Ulam moving his hanFds up and down like the pans of a scale. “Approximately my entire family was dying in the Holocaust. Exterminated for being Jews. Safe in America, I fight our enemies by working on the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb. I helped create the instant holocaust of Hiroshima—and the potential for much worse. I am the exterminated and the exterminator. Both sides.” He dropped his hands.

“I’m—I’m glad you’re willing to talk,” said Alan, damping down the wild skug-chatter in his head. “I should tell you that I’m not Peter Pfaff. I’m Alan Turing.”

“In wonderland!” exclaimed Ulam, his eyes keen. “If true. You and I were once exchanging letters, yes? About what?”

“About Turing machines and the van Kampen characteristic of a continuous group,” said Alan readily. “Fifteen years ago. I pointed out a flaw in your reasoning.”

“Most excellent,” said Ulam, shaking Alan’s hand. “And I was thinking Turing is dead. A suicide, they were saying.”

“The British security’s lie,” said Alan. “The filthy MI5. They wanted to exterminate me for being homosexual.”

“It never stops,” said Ulam. “Persecution upon persecution.”

“I used a biocomputational technique to elude them,” said Alan, still proud of his maneuver. “And this led to my skugs.”

“You the father of the skugs!” exclaimed Ulam. “And I the father of the H-bomb. An apocalyptic partnership. Do you feel you can you work with me, Alan? Is your skug symbiote granting you sufficient free will?”

“My skug is eager to win your confidence,” said Alan. “As am I. But of course you can’t fully trust me.”

“Understood from the start,” said Ulam. “A risk worth taking. You have an unparalleled record in merging mathematics and practical technology. I am knowing of your classified work on breaking the German Enigma code.”

“So set the score even and tell me about Project Utopia,” said Turing hungrily. “The V-bomb in the canyon,”

“Not quite yet,” said Ulam, perhaps surprised that Alan knew even this much. “I need to weigh the risks and benefits. For today—let’s tinker. To warm up. And tomorrow we get to work. First play—then pounce. One day is enough for any job.”

“Fine,” said Alan. “But there’s one more thing. That woman whom you told them to fire. She works as Polly Pfaff in the tape punching room. Posing as my wife. Everything I know, I share with her. Bring her in here with us. I’m concerned about what Dora and your security might do to her. Let her play with us too.”

“She is another mathematician?”

“She composes electronic music.”

“Aha. We are fiddling while Rome burns.”

Ulam picked up a telephone with an elaborate hood over the mouthpiece that kept Alan from hearing what he was saying. The hood was wired to a black box on the floor. It was an electronic sound-cancellation device—Turing himself had built one for the British Navy. You could block a sound by emitting a counter-sound that was precisely out of synch. You needed the hood to send the counter-sound into the room rather than into the mouthpiece with the message-sound.