Authors: John Varley
“I agree,” said Sherman. I waited for Martin or Lawrence to protest the idiocy of letting an animated dildo have a voice in these proceedings, but neither of them batted an eye. They turned to listen to Sherman, so I did, too.
“To sum up what happened,” he went on, “Smith saw her, she looked at him, and she ran. Is that accurate, Louise? Don’t bare your teeth like that; it’s not attractive.”
“Wait until I get you home with a screwdriver and a soldering iron.”
“That’s as may be. Right now we’re talking about your recent failure. Is my account of your failure an accurate one?”
“I’ll peel that smarmy face right off your head, you—”
“This is not germane to the question of your—”
“Stop using that word!”
“—failure. Sit down, Louise. Breathe regularly; the faintness will pass.”
I did, and it did.
Sherman leaned closer to me and spoke in a voice I’m pretty sure the others couldn’t hear.
“I have taken certain actions I thought appropriate,” he said. “The new face is one of them. The induced catharsis was another. If you’re calm enough to continue and if you’ll concede my right to be here in this conference, we can proceed, and discuss your grievances when we’re alone.”
I swallowed hard, and nodded. I didn’t trust myself to talk.
“So he saw you, and you ran. Does that sum it up?”
I nodded again.
“Then I don’t think the damage is great. There was no question of him penetrating your disguise.”
“That’s right,” Lawrence said. “Look at it from his viewpoint. He saw a woman in a United Airlines uniform, and she ran from him.”
“An odd thing to do,” Martin said.
“Sure, but she can explain it to him the next time she meets him. We can think of some kind of story to—”
“Wait a minute. What’s this about me meeting him again?”
“That was my idea,” Sherman said.
I looked from one to the other, taking my time about it.
“You didn’t suggest it while I was here,” I said. “So the three of you were talking while I was gone.”
“That’s right,” Lawrence said. “Sherman arrived just as we were getting the new information.”
“What new information?”
“Lawrence expressed it badly,” Sherman said. “I arrived, and after a great deal of trouble making myself heard, managed to communicate to the operations team that I knew what they were about to discover. Shortly afterward, they discovered it.”
“We’re still not sure about the time sequence,” Lawrence said, defensively.
“I’m sure,” Sherman said.
“Will someone tell it to me straight?” I asked. “Start to finish, just the way things happen in real time?”
The three of them looked at each other, and I swear, Martin and Lawrence were the ones who looked uncertain while Sherman was stolid as a stone.
“He’d better tell it,” Lawrence conceded.
“Very well,” Sherman said. “Thirty seconds before you went through the Gate, I was at the Post Office, where the Big Computer had summoned me. I read the message that was waiting for me just as you stepped through. Pursuant to instruction in the message, I came here.”
* * *
I hadn’t known there was a message waiting for Sherman. I hadn’t known that
any
robot had ever gotten a time capsule.
There was a good reason for that. This was an unusual message. It specified on the outside that no human was to be notified of the identity of the recipient, nor of the date of its opening. The BC, as I said, follows these instructions literally. Technically, the Programming Council has
instructed
the BC to follow the directions on time capsules, but I wonder what the BC would have done if the Council had said otherwise.
Well, “would have done” is nothing but a rarefied form of the verb “to do.” And a very pointless one.
The message told Sherman—among other things, and we’ll get to that—to go to Gate operations and tell Lawrence that I was going to have a face-to-face meeting with Bill Smith, and that I would fail in my mission. That word again.
He did that, or tried to. It was hard to get their attention, for two reasons: the Operations team was still probing in and around the era with their time-scan tanks and things were clearing up a little, and…well, he was a robot. Most people were astonished that he was there. It was as if my refrigerator had come into Operations, tap-dancing and singing “Suwannee,” wearing a sandwich board proclaiming the end of the world.
But he managed to tell them. Simultaneously, or a few seconds later, depending on who you believe, one of the operatives spotted Bill Smith in a helicopter returning from the 747 crash site and someone else found the same helicopter parked on the apron outside the hangar I was visiting. Inference: Smith and I could meet inside that hangar.
That’s when they started listening to Sherman. It was a matter of a few seconds to confirm that he had indeed received a time capsule, at which point his stock went up tremendously. I’d recently experienced the same effect. Me and my people tend to listen to somebody who’s just received a message from the future.
And of course that’s when he started to clam up.
* * *
“The message was quite specific,” he said. “There are certain things I can tell you, and other things that I must keep secret.”
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t bullshit a bullsh—” That’s as far as I got, and wished I’d buttoned my lip about five syllables earlier. I remembered my suspicion that the Council might be listening in, and the recent time-capsule-inspired performance I’d given them to get this operation authorized.
“There are a few more things I can say,” Sherman went on. “The first is that my message confirmed yours, Louise. It said this operation is vital to the success of the Gate Project.” He glanced at me, and I wished I’d had more experience at reading his eyes, but you can’t read what isn’t there. His new eyes were fake, of course, but looked very natural. His mouth was just a sketch. It could convey expression in the same way a cartoon can. He hadn’t bothered with a nose.
“The second thing concerns the next phase, since we all agree the excursion back to window A was of no use.”
So the subject was back to windows. What we had was B, C, and D. I thought D was too dangerous, B too unlikely to produce results, and C…
Tell him about the kid. She’s just a wimp.
Nobody knew it but me, but I wasn’t going back to Window C. I took a deep breath, got ready to do a cowardly thing, which was to put all my weight behind a trip back to B. I was pretty sure Martin would vote with me, and I thought I could swing Lawrence. The one thing I was sure of was that nobody would go for D. D was the site of the paradox, and surely too dangerous to visit.
“The third thing I can tell you now,” Sherman went on, “is that the next visit must be to 2300 hours, Pacific time, on the night of the 13th of December. This is the window you have referred to as D. And Louise should lead the operation.”
Testimony of Bill Smith
There was one of those stand-up places not too far from our conference room. We went in there because we didn’t think we’d have time for much more than that. I’ve seen those places in airports from LAX to Orly, and I’ve always wondered why people would want to stand up to eat their stale hot dogs. I guess the answer was obvious: they were in a hurry, like us.
I got something they claimed was roast beef, then I spent a lot of time tearing open and squeezing those little packets of mustard and ketchup and some unidentifiable white sauce to kill the gluey taste of the meat. Tom got a chili dog he had to eat with a plastic fork.
“Had you heard that story before?” I asked him.
“Some of it. I had some idea that’s what he’d say.”
“What’d you think of it?”
Tom took some time with his answer. I was interested, because ground control and operations was his specialty, and he knows a lot about electronics in general—an area I’ll admit isn’t my strongest. He was an M.I.T. graduate in computer science, whereas I was a member of the last generation who still knew what a slide rule looked like. You have to know something about
computers in my line of work, and I did, but I’d never grown to love them.
“It could happen,” he said, at last.
“Do you think it did?”
“I believed him, if that’s what you’re asking. We may even get corroboration out of the computer. It’ll take some work.”
I chewed that over.
“Okay. Assuming it’s true. Who do you think we hang for it?”
“What, are you asking for a guess?”
“Why not?”
“Hell, I don’t know if we can hang anybody at all. It’s early, you understand. There may be something we can turn up that’ll—”
“Off the record, Tom.”
He nodded. “Right. We still might not find anybody to blame.”
“Listen, Tom. If a tornado springs out of a clear blue sky and wrecks a plane, I’ll concede it wasn’t anybody’s fault. If a meteor falls on a plane, we probably couldn’t have done anything about it. If—”
“Spare me the speech,” he said. “I’ve heard it. What if it turns out that the people to blame are us? You and me and the Board.”
“It’s
been
me. It’ll be me again.” I didn’t go on, because he knew what I was talking about. Sometimes we can’t find out exactly what went wrong and you never know if it’s just because you didn’t look hard enough. Then again, sometimes you find the cause, put it in the report, tell the folks who are supposed to fix it, and they don’t fix it. You keep after them to do something about it, but you’ll never know if you pushed them hard enough. Did you really go to the wall over it, and was it worth risking your job for…and so forth. So far there’d never been a clear-cut case where a plane had crashed because I’d overlooked something, let something go that I should have done. But there were any number of crashes that left me wondering if I’d pushed just a
little
bit harder…
“Eli said he’s seen this before,” Tom said.
“Did he report it?” I mean, Eli was a friend, but there are limits.
“He says he did. He’s only seen it once, but he’s heard of two or three more times it’s happened. It’s just been such a small problem that nobody’s gotten around to doing anything. You know, the problem of the old computers in general outweighs this glitch in particular. There’s a file on it back in Washington.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“Yeah. I’ve even fiddled with a solution, but I don’t know if it’d work. Short of getting new hardware.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a one-in-a-million thing. It can happen when two planes are in the same section of the sky and the same distance from the radar dish. The ground station queries the onboard transponders, and they respond, and the signals get to the ground at the same time. It’s got to be
real
close; thousandths of a second. And then, sometimes, the computer can’t handle it. They mistake the signals and put the wrong numbers up on the screen. It’s garbage in, garbage out.”
I knew what he was talking about, but I wasn’t sure he was right. Computers, contrary to what you may have been told, are not smart. They’re just fast. They can be programmed to act smart, but then it’s the programmer who’s actually smart and not the computer. If you give a computer long enough to chew on a problem it will usually solve it. And since a long time to a computer is about a millionth of a second, they give the illusion of being smart.
“Okay,” I said. “So the information the computer got was garbage, or at least misleading. An ATC computer shouldn’t accept information that’s
obvious
garbage.”
“But how obvious was it? And don’t forget it was just shut down. Maybe it didn’t have anything to work from. Maybe it was starting from scratch, and it seemed perfectly reasonable that two planes had changed positions.”
“It should have been obvious.”
“Well,” he said, with a sigh, “it
would
have been obvious to the new computers, which wouldn’t have gone down in the first place.”
I looked at him for a while, and for a while he kept chewing on his hot dog, which seemed tougher than any hot dog had a right to be.
“You’re saying the new computers could have handled this?”
“Damn right they could have. They do it every day. The ones we’ve got in place. Hell, there were computers around seven or eight years ago that wouldn’t have got into the bind this one did.”
“We should have pushed harder.”
“How much harder can you push?”
He was talking about a meeting six months before. Because of a computer overload in the Boston area there had been a situation that had been brought to our attention. In this case the planes didn’t hit, they just sort of played chicken with each other until one pilot pulled up in time. So once again we brought up the subject of computer replacement.
Most of the FAA computers were bought and installed in 1968. Somebody had what must have seemed like a good idea at the time, which was to buy the hardware instead of lease it. So the U.S. Government soon owned many millions of dollars worth of computers, which they operated and maintained themselves.
Years went by.
If you know anything about the computer field, you know that a computer built ten years ago might as well come from the Stone Age. It doesn’t matter that the thing has been well-maintained, that it works wonderfully at what it was designed to do: it’s worth nothing at all. If you can sell it for scrap metal you’re lucky, because who wants to buy a big mainframe computer that can’t do half the stuff that can be done better nowadays by a machine a hundredth the size?
The FAA computers were now white elephants. They worked—though they were approaching the limits of their design
load and as a result suffering a lot of downtime. We were in the process of replacing them, but it’s expensive and budgets are tight. It would take a while.
And what the hell? In that business, about the time you take the dustcovers off and plug them in, somebody’s got something twice as good on the market at half the price. We find ourselves always looking down the road at what’ll be available next year and wondering if it might not make more sense to wait just a little longer.