He was affronted. ‘I really can’t tell you that,’ he said coldly. ‘And now you must excuse me. There are some important pieces coming up which I must handle myself.’
He turned to walk away, and I said desperately, ‘Can you tell me when the railway will come up for sale?’
‘Things are going briskly.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’d say about three this afternoon.’ He walked out.
‘A telephone,’ I said. ‘My kingdom for a telephone.’
‘There’s one next door in Ashton’s bedroom.’ Michaelis looked at me a little oddly. ‘This sudden interest in model railways doesn’t seem kosher to me.’
I had a sudden thought. ‘Where are those schedules?’
‘In the attic; on a shelf under the control console. There are a dozen.’
‘I want you in the attic on the double. Keep an eye on that railway and especially on those schedules. I don’t want
anything removed and I want note taken of anyone who takes a special interest. Now move.’
I went into Ashton’s room and attacked the telephone. For the first time Ogilvie let me down; he wasn’t in the office and no one knew where he was or when he’d be back. Neither was he at home. I left messages to say he should ring me at the Ashton house as soon as possible.
There were more frustrations. Mr Veasey of Michelmore, Veasey and Templeton, was away in the fastness of Wales talking to a valued but bedridden client. His clerk would not make a decision in the matter, and neither would any of the partners. They did say they would try to get hold of Veasey by telephone and I had to be satisfied with that. I had no great hopes of success - Veasey didn’t know me and I had no standing.
I went up to the attic and found Michaelis brooding over the railway. Several small boys were larking about and being chased off by a Securicor guard. ‘Any suspects?’
‘Only Hartman. He’s been checking through those schedules all morning.’ He nodded in the direction of the control console. There he is.’
Hartman was a broad-shouldered man of less than average height with a shock of white hair and a nut-brown lined face. He looked rather like Einstein might have looked if Einstein had been an American businessman. At that moment he was poring over one of the schedules and frowning.
I said, ‘You’re sure that
is
Hartman?’
‘Oh, yes. I met him three years ago at a Model Railway Exhibition. What the hell are you really up to, Malcolm?’
I looked at the railway. ‘You’re the expert. Are there any other peculiarities about this other than the schedules?’
Michaelis stared at the spider web of rails. ‘It did occur to me that there’s an excessive number of sidings and marshalling yards.’
‘Yes,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘There would be.’
‘Why would there be?’ Michaelis was baffled.
‘Ashton was a clever bastard,’ I said. ‘He wanted to hide something so he stuck it right under our noses. Do you know how a computer works?’
‘In a vague sort of way.’
I said, ‘Supposing you instruct a computer that A=5. That tells the computer to take that number five and put it in a location marked A. Suppose you gave the instruction C=A+B. That tells the computer to take whatever number is in A, add it to whatever number is in B, and put the result in C.’ I jerked my head towards the railway. ‘I think that’s what this contraption is doing.’
Michaelis gasped. ‘A
mechanical
computer!’
‘Yes. And those schedules are the programs which run it - but God knows what they’re about. Tell me, how many different kinds of rolling stock are there in the system? I’d say ten.’
‘You’d be wrong. I counted sixty-three.’
‘Hell!’ I thought about it a little more. ‘No, by God, I’m right! Ten for the numbers 0 to 9; twenty-six for the letters of the alphabet, and the rest for mathematical signs and punctuation. This bloody thing can probably talk English.’
‘I think you’re nuts,’ said Michaelis.
I said, ‘When Ashton was shot he couldn’t talk but he was trying to tell me something. He pulled something from his pocket and tried to give it to me. It was a railway timetable.’
‘That’s pretty thin,’ said Michaelis. ‘Larry had one, too.’
‘But why should a man in his last extremity try to give me, of all things, a railway timetable? I think he was trying to tell me something.’
‘I can see why you want the sale stopped,’ admitted Michaelis. ‘It’s a nutty idea, but you may be right.’
‘I haven’t got very far,’ I said gloomily. ‘Ashton’s law firm won’t play and Ogilvie’s gone missing. I’d better try him again.’
So I did, but with no joy. I tried every place I thought he might be - his clubs, the restaurant he had once taken me to, then back to the office and his home again. No Ogilvie.
At half past two Michaelis sought me out. ‘They’re about to start bidding on the railway. What are you going to do?’
‘Make another call.’
I rang my bank manager, who said, ‘And what can I do for you this afternoon, Mr Jaggard?’
‘Later today I’m going to write a largish cheque. There won’t be enough funds to cover it, either in my current account or in the deposit account I don’t want it to bounce.’
‘I see. How much will the cheque be for?’
‘Perhaps £20,000.’ I thought of Hartman, ‘Maybe as much as £25,000.1 don’t quite know.’
‘That’s a lot of money, Mr Jaggard.’
I said, ‘You know the state of my financial health, and you know I can cover it, not immediately but in a few weeks.’
‘In effect, what you’re asking for is a bridging loan for, say, a month.’
‘That’s it.’
‘I don’t see any difficulty there. We’ll accept your cheque, but try to keep it down; and come in tomorrow - we’ll need your signature.’
‘Thanks.’ I put down the telephone knowing that if I was wrong about the railway I was about to lose a lot of money. I couldn’t see Ogilvie dipping into the department’s funds to buy an elaborate toy, and the only person who might be happy about it would be Michaelis.
I went into the hall to see a small crowd gathered by the rostrum listening to a man talking. Michaelis whispered,
‘They’ve got old Hempson from
Model Railway News
to give a pep-talk. I suppose they think that’ll drive up the price.’
Hempson was saying, ‘…core of the system is the most remarkable console I have ever seen, using the ultimate in modern technology. It is this which makes this example of the art unique and it is to be hoped that the system will be sold as a complete unit. It would be a disaster if such a fine example should be broken up. Thank you.’
He stepped down to a low murmur of agreement, and I saw Hartman nodding in approval. The auctioneer stepped up and lifted his gavel. ‘Ladies and gentlemen: you have just heard Mr Hempson who is an acknowledged expert, and his opinion counts. So I am about to ask for bids for the complete system. It would be normal to do this on site, as it were, but even in so large a house the attic is not big enough to hold both the exhibit and the crowd gathered here. However, you have all had the opportunity of examining this fine example of the model-maker’s art, and on the table over there is a representative collection of the rolling stock.’
He raised his gavel. ‘Now what am I bid for the complete system? Who will start the bidding at £20,000?’
There was a sigh - a collective exhalation of breath. ‘Come,’ said the auctioneer cajolingly. ‘You just heard Mr Hempson. Who will bid £20,000? No one? Who will bid £18.000?’
He had no takers at that, and gradually his starting price came down until he had a bid of £8000. ‘£8000 I am bid - who will say nine? Eight-five I am bid - thank you, sir - who will say nine? Nine I am bid - who will say ten?’
Michaelis said, ‘The dealers are coming in, but they won’t stand a chance. Hartman will freeze them out.’
I had been watching Hartman who hadn’t moved a muscle. The bidding crept up by 500s, hesitated at the £13,500 mark, and then went up by 250s to £15,000 where it stuck.
‘Fifteen I am bid; fifteen I am bid,’ chanted the auctioneer. ‘Any advance on fifteen?’
Hartman flicked a finger. ‘Sixteen I am bid,’ said the auctioneer. ‘£16,000. Any advance on sixteen?’ The dealers were frozen out.
I held up a finger. ‘Seventeen I am bid. Any advance on seventeen? Eighteen I am bid - and nineteen - and twenty. I have a bid of £20,000. Any advance on twenty?’
There was a growing rustle of interest as Hartman and I battled it out. At £25,000 he hesitated for the first time and raised his bid by £500. Then I knew I had him. I raised a single finger and the auctioneer said, ‘Twenty-six and a half - any advance…twenty-seven, thank you, sir - twenty-eight I am bid.’
And so it went. Hartman lost his nerve at thirty and gave up. The auctioneer said, ‘Any advance on thirty-one? Any advance on thirty-one? Going once.’
Crack!
‘Going twice.’
Crack!
‘Sold to Mr Jaggard for £31,000.’
Crack!
I was now the proud owner of a railway. Maybe it wasn’t British Rail but perhaps it might show more profit. I said to Michaelis, ‘I wonder if Ogilvie has that much in the petty cash box?’
Hartman came over. ‘I guess you wanted that very much, sir.’
‘I did.’
‘Perhaps you would be so kind as to let me study the layout some time. I am particularly interested in those schedules.’
I said, ‘I’m sorry. I acted as agent in this matter. However, if you give me your address I’ll pass it to the owner for his decision.’
He nodded. ‘I suppose that will have to do.’
Then I was surrounded by pressmen wanting to know who, in his right mind, would pay that much money for a
toy. I was rescued by Mary Cope. ‘You’re wanted on the telephone, Mr Jaggard.’
I made my escape into Ashton’s study. It was Ogilvie. ‘I understand you wanted me.’
‘Yes,’ I said, wishing he had rung half an hour earlier. ‘The department owes me £31,000 plus bank charges.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You now own a model railway.’
His language was unprintable.
I saw Ogilvie at his home that night. His welcome was somewhat cool and unenthusiastic and he looked curiously at the big ledger I carried as he ushered me into his study. I dumped it on his desk and sat down. Ogilvie warmed his coat tails at the fire, and said, ‘Did you really spend £31,000 on a toy train set?’
I smiled. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘You’re a damned lunatic,’ he said. ‘And if you think the department will reimburse you, then I’ll get the quacks in and have you certified. No bloody model railway can be worth that much.’
‘An American called Hartman thought it worth £30,000,’ I observed. ‘Because that’s how much he bid. You haven’t seen it. This is no toy you buy your kid for Christmas and assemble on the floor before the living-room fire to watch the chuff-chuff go round in circles. This is big and complex.’
‘I don’t care how big and complex it is. Where the hell do you think I’m going to put it in the department budget? The accountants would have
me
certified. And what makes you think the department wants it?’
‘Because it holds what we’ve been looking for all the time. It’s a computer.’ I tapped the ledger. ‘And this is the programing for it. One of the programs. There are eleven more which I put in the office vaults.’
I told him how Michaelis had unavailingly tried to sort out the schedules and how I’d made an intuitive jump based on the timetable in Ashton’s hand. I said, ‘It would be natural these days for a theoretician to use a computer, but Ashton knew we’d look into all his computer files and programs. So he built his own and disguised it.’
‘It’s the most improbable idea I’ve ever heard,’ said Ogilvie. ‘Michaelis is the train expert. What does he think?’
‘He thinks I’m crazy.’
‘He’s not far wrong.’ Ogilvie began to pace the room. ‘I tell you what I think. If you’re right then the thing is cheap at the price and the department will pay. If you’re wrong then it costs
you
£31,000.’
‘Plus bank charges.’ I shrugged. ‘I stuck out my neck, so I’ll take the chance.’
‘I’ll get the computer experts on it tomorrow.’ He wagged his head sadly. ‘But where are we to put it? If I have it installed in the department offices it’ll only accelerate my retirement. Should the Minister hear of it he’ll think I’ve gone senile - well into second childhood.’
‘It will need a big room,’ I said. ‘Best to rent a warehouse.’
‘I’ll authorize that. You can get on with it. Where is it now?’
‘Still in the Ashtons’ attic. Michaelis is locked in with it for the night.’
‘Enthusiastically playing trains, I suppose.’ Ogilvie shook his head in sheer wonderment at the things his staff got up to. He joined me at the desk and tapped the schedule. ‘Now tell me what you think this is all about.’
It took four days to dismantle the railway and reassemble it in a warehouse in South London. The computer boys thought my idea hilarious and to them the whole thing was a big giggle, but they went about the job competently
enough. Ogilvie gave me Michaelis to assist. The department had never found the need for a model railway technician and Michaelis found himself suddenly elevated into the rank of expert, first class. He quite liked it.
The chief computer man was a systems analyst called Harrington. He took the job more seriously than most of the others but even that was only half-serious. He installed a computer terminal in the warehouse and had it connected to a computer by post office land lines; not the big chap Nellie was hooked up to, but an ordinary commercial timesharing computer in the City. Then we were ready to go.
About this time I got a letter from Penny. She wrote that Gillian was well and had just had the operation for the first of the skin grafts. She herself was not coming back immediately; Lumsden had suggested that she attend a seminar at Berkeley in California, so she wouldn’t be back for a further week or ten days.
I showed the letter to Michaelis and he said he’d had one from Gillian, written just before the operation. ‘She seemed a bit blue.’
‘Not to worry; probably just pre-operation nerves.’
The itch at the back of my mind was still there, and so the buried connection was nothing to do with the railway. Little man Hunch was sitting up and rubbing his eyes but was still not yet awake. I badly needed to talk to Penny because I thought it was something she had said that had caused the itch. I was sorry she wasn’t coming home for that reason among many.
One morning at ten o’clock Harrington opened the LNER schedule. ‘The first few pages are concerned with the placement of the engines and the rolling stock,’ he said. ‘Now, let’s get this right if we can. This is silly enough as it is without us putting our own bugs into the system.’
It took over an hour to get everything in the right place - checked and double checked. Harrington said, ‘Page eleven
to page twenty-three are concerned with the console settings.’ He turned to me. ‘If there’s anything to your idea at all these Roms will have to be analysed to a fare-thee-well.’
‘What’s a Rom?’
‘A read-only module - this row of boxes plugged in here. Your man, Michaelis, calls them microprocessors. They are pre-programed electronic chips - we’ll have to analyse what they’re programed to do. All right; let’s get on with the setting.’
He began to call out numbers and an acolyte pressed buttons and turned knobs. When he had finished he started again from the beginning and another acolyte checked what the first had done. He caught three errors. ‘See what I mean,’ said Harrington. ‘One bug is enough to make a program unworkable.’
‘Are you ready to go now?’
‘I think so - for the first stage.’ He put his hand on the ledger. ‘There are over two hundred pages here, so
if
this thing really is a computer and
if
this represents one program, then after a while everything should come to a stop and the console will have to be readjusted for the next part of the program. It’s going to take a long time.’
‘It will take even longer if we don’t start,’ I said tartly.
Harrington grinned and leaned over to snap a single switch. Things began to happen. Trains whizzed about the system, twenty or thirty on the move at once. Some travelled faster than others, and once I thought there was going to be a collision as two trains headed simultaneously for a junction; but one slowed just enough to let the other through and then picked up speed again.
Sidings and marshalling yards that had been empty began to fill up as engines pushed in rolling stock and then uncoupled to shoot off somewhere else. I watched one marshalling yard fill up and then begin to empty, the trains being broken up and reassembled into other patterns.
Harrington grunted. ‘This is no good; it’s too damned busy. Too much happening at once. If this is a computer it isn’t working sequentially like an ordinary digital job; it’s working in parallel. It’s going to be hell to analyse.’
The system worked busily for nearly two hours. Trains shot back and forth, trucks were pushed here and there, abandoned temporarily and then picked up again in what seemed an arbitrary manner. To me it was bloody monotonous but Michaelis was enthralled and even Harrington appeared to be mildly interested. Then everything came to a dead stop.
Harrington said, ‘I’ll want a video-camera up there.’ He pointed to the ceiling. ‘I want to be able to focus on any marshalling yard and record it on tape. And I want it in colour because I have a feeling colour comes into this. And we can slow down a tape for study. Can you fix that?’
‘You’ll have it tomorrow morning,’ I promised. ‘But what do you think now?’
‘It’s an ingenious toy, but there may be something more to it,’ he said, noncommittally. ‘We have a long way to go yet.’
I didn’t spend all my time in the warehouse but went back three days later because Harrington wanted to see me. I found him at a desk flanked by a video-recorder and a TV set. ‘We may have something,’ he said, and pointed to a collection of miniature rolling stock on the desk. ‘There
is
a number characterization.’
I didn’t know what he meant by that, and said so. He smiled. ‘I’m saying you were right. This railway is a computer. I think that any of this rolling stock which has red trim on it represents a digit.’ He picked up a tank car which had ESSO lettered on the side in red. ‘This one, for instance, I think represents a zero.’
He put down the tank car and I counted the trucks; there were nine, but one had no red on it. ‘Shouldn’t there be ten?’
‘Eight,’ he said. This gadget is working in octal instead of decimal. That’s no problem - many computers work in octal internally.’ He picked up a small black truck. ‘And I think this little chap is an octal point - the equivalent of a decimal point.’
‘Well, I’m damned! Can I tell Ogilvie?’
Harrington sighed. ‘I’d rather you didn’t - not yet. We haven’t worked out to our satisfaction which number goes with which truck. Apart from that there is a total of sixty-three types of rolling stock; I rather think some of those represent letters of the alphabet to give the system alphanumeric capability. Identification may be difficult. It should be reasonably easy to work out the numbers; all that it takes is logic. But letters are different. I’ll show you what I mean.’
He switched on the video-recorder and the TV set, then punched a button. An empty marshalling yard appeared on the screen, viewed from above. A train came into view and the engine stopped and uncoupled, then trundled off. Another train came in and the same thing happened; and yet again until the marshalling yard was nearly full. Harrington pressed a button and froze the picture.
‘This marshalling yard is typical of a dozen in the system, all built to the same specification - to hold a maximum of eighty trucks. You’ll notice there are no numbers in there - no red trucks.’ With his pen he pointed out something else. ‘And scattered at pretty regular intervals are these blue trucks.’
‘Which are?’
Harrington leaned back. ‘If I were to talk in normal computer terms - which may be jargon to you - I’d say I was looking at an alphameric character string with a maximum capacity of eighty characters, and the blue trucks represent
the spaces between words.’ He jabbed his finger at the screen. ‘That is saying something to us, but we don’t know what.’
I bent down and counted the blue trucks; there were thirteen. ‘Thirteen words,’ I said.
‘Fourteen,’ said Harrington. ‘There’s no blue truck at the end. Now, there are twelve marshalling yards like this, so the system has a capacity of holding at any one time about a hundred and sixty words in plain, straightforward English - about half a typed quarto sheet. I know it’s not much, but it keeps changing all the time as the system runs; that’s the equivalent of putting a new page in the typewriter and doing some more.’ He smiled. ‘I don’t know who designed this contraption, but maybe it’s a new way of writing a novel.’
‘So all you have to do is to find out which truck equals which letter.’
‘All!’ said Harrington hollowly. He picked up a thick sheaf of colour photographs. ‘We’ve been recording the strings as they form and I have a chap on the computer doing a statistical analysis. So far he’s making heavy weather of it. But we’ll get it, it’s just another problem in cryptanalysis. Anyway, I just thought I’d let you know your harebrained idea turned out to be right, after all.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, glad not to be £31,000 out of pocket. Plus bank charges.
Two days later Harrington rang me again. ‘We’ve licked the numbers,’ he said. ‘And we’re coming up with mathematical formulae now. But the alphabet is a dead loss. The statistical distribution of the letters is impossible for English, French, German, Spanish and Latin. That’s as far as we’ve gone. It’s a bit rum - there are too many letters.’
I thought about that. ‘Try Russian; there are thirty-two letters in the Russian alphabet.’ And the man who had
designed the railway was a Russian, although I didn’t say that to Harrington.
‘That’s a thought. I’ll ring you back.’
Four hours later he rang again. ‘It’s Russian,’ he said. ‘But we’ll need a linguist; we don’t know enough about it here.’
‘Now is the time to tell Ogilvie. We’ll be down there in an hour.’
So I told Ogilvie. He said incredulously, ‘You mean that bloody model railway speaks Russian?’
I grinned. ‘Why not? It was built by a Russian.’
‘You come up with the weirdest things,’ he complained.
‘I didn’t,’ I said soberly. ‘Ashton did. Now you can make my bank manager happy by paying £35,000 into my account.’
Ogilvie narrowed his eyes. ‘It cost you only £31,000.’
‘“Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth the corn”,’ I quoted. ‘It was a risky investment - I reckon I deserve a profit.’
He nodded. ‘Very well. But it’s going to look damned funny in the books - for one model railway, paid to M. Jaggard, £35,000.’
‘Why don’t you call it by its real name? A computing system.’
His brow cleared. ‘That’s it. Now let’s take a look at this incredible thing.’ We collected Larry Godwin as an interpreter and went to the warehouse.
The first thing I noticed was that the system wasn’t running and I asked Harrington why. ‘No need,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Now we’ve got the character list sorted out we’ve duplicated the system in a computer - put it where it really belongs. We weren’t running the entire program, you know; just small bits of it. To run through it all would have been impossible.’
I stared at him. ‘Why?’
‘Well, not really impossible. But look.’ He opened the LNER schedule and flipped through. ‘Take these five pages here. They contain reiterative loops. I estimate that to run these five pages on the system would take six days, at twenty-four hours a day. To run through the whole program would take about a month and a half - and this is one of the smaller programs. To put all twelve of them through would take about two years.’
He closed the schedule. ‘I think the original programs were written on, and for, a real computer, and then transferred on to this system. But don’t ask me why. Anyway, now we’ve put the system back into a computer we’re geared to work at the speed of electrons and not on how fast a model railway engine can turn its wheels.’