The Steel Crocodile

Book 49: Gateway Essentials

by D.G. Compton

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Dystopian; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

In answer to an unanswerable future, science has created Bohn, the omnipotent computer whose flashing circuits and messianic pronouncements dictate what tomorrow will - or will not - be. But Matthew Oliver is flesh and blood and full of questions - not nearly as certain as the machine he's appointed to serve. And the right hand of science seldom knows what the left hand is doing . . .

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 232

Sample

Gryphon turned on the high-frequency jammer. Before being taken over by the university, his office had been used by an insurance company, and therefore had been fully wired. Gryphon had ripped out the equipment as soon as he’d moved in, and bought himself a bug jammer. It stood on his desk now, neither obtrusive nor in any way concealed. Matthew recognized it from the advertisements, and also because it was the model recommended in the previous month’s bulletin from the Civil Liberties Committee. Matthew wasn’t himself a member of the C.L.C., but he was on their mailing list on account of his work.

‘Were you followed on your way here?’ Matthew nodded. ‘So?’

‘So I did what you said.’ Matthew felt grubby. He’d never had a tail before. He was a sociologist, an ethnologist, not an alienee. Not that he had anything against alienees – some of his best friends were … But if working at the Colindale meant that he was no longer to be trusted, then he’d refuse the job while there was still time.

‘It worked?’

‘Not at first. I didn’t believe in your radio homer, so I did a lot of running up and down stairs and hiding in doorways. I might have saved my energy.’

‘Where was it?’

‘In my coat collar. Silly little thing on a pin. I expect it was stuck there while I was in the washroom at the Ministry.’

‘They must have thought you very innocent, Matthew. They have much craftier ways with the old hands.’

‘Innocent? Don’t you mean naïve?’

Of course he was naïve. He needed naïveté in his work; it helped him to remain outside, separate from the problems he studied. Abigail didn’t agree with him, of course – her tutor had preached total commitment, the discovery of truths-from-within: far truer truths, Abigail said, than his overall ones. Abigail … even to remember her name comforted him. He wished she were with him at that moment. He functioned so much better with her around.

‘And this pin,’ Gryphon was saying. ‘When you found it, did you do what I suggested?’

‘I did not. What about the feelings of the next man – being followed all across London for no reason at all?’

‘He’d probably be used to it. Most people are.’

‘It’s all wrong, Gryphon. The very fact of being followed – it made me feel guilty at once.’

‘Isn’t that one of the points? Besides, with my letter in your pocket they’d have said you were guilty.’

‘That’s what I mean. I’d rather you left me out.’

Gryphon’s room was cool, with reversible wall panels in green and black, white bookshelves and racks for microfilm. The picture on the back wall was responding to the harsh city sunlight with a range of metallic yellows and grays. The window overlooked St Paul’s, the dome below them sharply striped with the shadow of the narrow Senate House. The University had come there as part of the European Save-the-Cities campaign, populating the voided towers with thirty thousand undergraduates. Matthew looked down at them, not ant-like, too still, too controlled by their fear and by an awareness of its potential. He wondered irrelevantly if Paul, Abigail’s brother, was among them. He remembered his own College years, his and Gryphon’s, in the days before the students had really tried their strength. Even then he had avoided the tear gas and the batons, and so had Gryphon. They had pretended to be apolitical, too absorbed in their studies. Perhaps they had been wise beyond their age after all.

‘Well?’ said Gryphon. ‘What did you do with it then?’

‘The pin? I’d gone into a gents to search for it, so I flushed it down the pan.’ Matthew shivered. ‘There you are. Being watched. Scuttling. Hiding in lavatories. Looking for electronic pins. It’s ridiculous – and slightly disgusting.’

‘I wonder what its range was. Amusing if your tail is running after it along the course of some sewer.’

Gryphon wasn’t answering him. Matthew turned back from the window.

‘You’re not answering me.’

‘Don’t let’s be too naïve. You’re here, therefore –’

‘I’m here to tell you I’ve decided to turn down the job at the Colindale Institute.’

‘You made that decision thirty seconds ago. I watched you make it.’

Always so right. Always the harder, clearer mind. So why stil a junior lecturer? Matthew, on the other hand, had been consultant on half a dozen major resettlements, was author of as many books, retained by three of the nine industrial giants … It seemed an impressive record.

‘And I hope to watch you unmake it.’ Gryphon pinched the bridge of his nose as if he still wore glasses. ‘Why did you come, Matthew? And why did you throw your tail as I asked you to?’

‘It’s the moral duty of’ – Gryphon was laughing at him but he battled on – ‘of everybody to make tailing as difficult as possible. Or we’d be back where evasion on its own was proof of guilt. And you know how the Public Prosecutor –’

‘That battle’s been won, Matthew. We can thank the student body for that, if not much else.’ He sorted through his papers and found a booklet which Matthew recognized: Physical Surveillance and the Free Citizen, issued by the C.L.C. ‘There’s another one coming out next week on Audio Surveillance,’ Gryphon said, ‘and there’s nothing the Public Prosecutor can do about it. The citizen has a right to protect himself. I want you to become a spy, Matthew.’

No pause, no change of tone. Was it a compliment, considering him too intelligent to be softened up first? Or an insult, knowing him too stupid to need any finesse at all …? Gryphon wasn’t smiling.

‘Matthew, I want you to accept the job at the Colindale Institute, and I want you to tell me what work is really being done there.’

‘You want me in jail for life?’

‘Reformative custody … and it might be worth it’ – Gryphon sounded tired – ‘if you got the information out to me first.’

Matthew wondered what Gryphon’s first name was. Five years at University, twelve years since, and he was still Gryphon. Matthew decided it was a mannerism, and became irritated.

‘Your paranoia shows, Gryphon. That’s why you’re still a junior lecturer.’

‘Your wife, Matthew, is a remarkable woman.’

It was a remark that Matthew couldn’t resent, for its implication was correct. He had never spoken like that to Gryphon before in his life, and he should have. Abigail was making him grow up.

‘She’ll agree with me about the Colindale. Surveillance, distrust, secrecy … there’s plenty of useful work I can do without all that. If being head of the Social Study Department means being watched and having my letters monitored, then I don’t want it.’

‘You could write in code. There are plenty of good coders on the market.’

Gryphon wasn’t missing his point. Indeed, he was making it even more forcibly.

‘I don’t need the money.’

‘None of us does. We’re vocationalists – sorry, dirty word.’

‘And I’m not interested in the status.’

‘You are, but not very. Probably not enough.’

‘So I shall find another job. Take some time off even. Cultivate my own garden. Abigail would like that.’

They had a cottage in Wales. Abigail would like that. Their chance to discover if their better life was no more than a Thoreau fantasy. Gryphon sighed.

‘When I heard they’d offered you a job at the Colindale I thought they’d made a mistake. I still do.’ He was rolling a microfilm to and fro on his desk, watching it closely. ‘Their first, their only mistake in a very long time. Which is why we must, must, must take advantage of it.’

‘We?’

‘You and I. This isn’t a C.L.C. matter. Far too indefinite. I need first-hand evidence before I can put it to the Committee.’

‘I’m not a member.’

‘Nobody ever is.’

‘But I’m really not.’

Matthew knew he was being willed to involve himself, to ask the question. Once he did so he was past halfway to accepting the answer, accepting its intellectual necessity. Gryphon wouldn’t be bothering otherwise. A cloud covered the sun, and the picture on the back wall shifted to orange and blue.

‘You’ll have to tell me what’s going on.’ Done for. ‘After all, what possible erosion could come from the Colindale? It’s one of the most enlightened projects ever thought of.’

‘I look for pattern, Matthew, and when I don’t find one I get suspicious. You believe in pattern, and so do I. It’s possible, of course, that my sample just isn’t big enough.’

‘Computers?’

‘I’ve tried, of course. Not even remote associations emerge. Nothing. Just a list of isolated facts.’

‘Tell me.’ Putting himself up to his neck, and beyond.

Gryphon clipped the microfilm into his desk viewer. It contained a list of names, with symbols beside each. He spun the reel, letters flicking shapelessly by. The striking of the Cathedral clock passed unnoticed.

‘Ten thousand students over the last four years’, Gryphon said, ‘analyzed by age, sex, race, income, political, religious and integrative criteria. The four years of the Colindale Institute. Ten thousand examination results, ten thousand theses, ten thousand decisions on further education, ten thousand first year grant appropriations, ten thousand second year appropriations. And no pattern.’ He spun the reel back again. ‘Examination results, thesis subject, social relevance, political bias, even sex – nothing makes a discernible pattern.’ He stopped the reel, enlarged a single name, translated the code for Matthew. ‘Danderson, female, twenty-three, unmarried, Nordic, fifth degree affluent, Communist, Buddhist, integrative index 01. Examination results, par for her year, disappointing on previous record. Thesis subject, virus caging in the S.17 group. Rating, 90 – that’s very good. Further education, naturally. First year appropriation, five hundred marks. Second year appropriation, nil.’ He sat back. ‘Which makes Miss. Danderson an excellent example of what is worrying me.’

Matthew stared at the row of Astran coordinates. In view of the rating, five hundred a year was niggardly. And why the sudden cutoff?

‘Any explanation given? Subject duplication?’

‘I expect so. It’s a usual one. No way of checking, of course.’

‘What makes you think the decision came from the Colindale? Why not the Appropriations Board?’

‘The Board exists on a political basis. A sample as big as this ought to reflect that fact, even allowing for overcompensations.’

‘So you want me to find out why Miss Danderson was discouraged.’

‘And four thousand like her, Matthew. A forty percent cutoff, and no pattern.’

Matthew frowned. To make the issue one of academic freedom was unfair, attacking him where he was least protected.

‘I gather your figures deal only with the physical sciences.’

‘Three months’ work. Not possible to include Arts or Social Sciences, even if the information were available to me. But I’m confident from what members of the staff have told me that there’s the same lack of pattern.’

Of course there was a pattern. There must be. Group decisions threw up patterns. A lot depended on the subtlety of the scanning.

‘I’ve been using the Friedmann 5000,’ Gryphon said. ‘Loops, parallel scanning, the lot.’

‘I still don’t see why you think the decisions are originating in the Colindale.’

‘Perhaps they don’t. Perhaps it’s just coincidence that the pre-Colindale appropriations were quite childishly predictable … Somebody has to make the decisions, Matthew. Whether they are right or wrong depends on the criteria.’

‘And you want me to find out the criteria as well.’

‘You’ll probably be working on them.’

Gryphon was a member of the central C.L.C. – Matthew knew this and had always tried not to know it. Not to act upon such knowledge was an explicit admission of approval. And Matthew neither approved nor disapproved. He was a sociologist. He hunched his shoulders against the choices being forced on him.

‘If we decide to use anything you tell us, Matthew, the leak will immediately become obvious. You’ll be the first one to come under suspicion.’

‘You’re only saying that to make the whole thing a point of honor to me.’

‘Intellectual honor.’

At first Matthew had been keen to go to the Colindale. It was a considerable honor to have been invited there. The computer resources of the Institute had been set up to coordinate and interrelate research findings throughout the whole European Community. By pooling the scientific resources of the member nations it minimized waste and moved competition out onto the larger, inter-powerbloc scale. Also it made its data stores and cross-referencing capability available to thousands of universities, research groups, and individual scientists. In the terms of its charter it was not a decision-making organization. If it was being used as such, then people should be told. Centers of power needed watching.

‘I must talk it over with Abigail.’

‘I wouldn’t. She’ll only push you even further than you want to go.’ Gryphon paused. ‘One other thing. I hear there are other people interested in the Colindale. People even less constitutional than we. I should like us to get in first, simply as a matter of saving lives.’

‘Other people?’

‘A group. Bombs, guns, the usual paraphernalia of militancy. So don’t dawdle, there’s a good fellow.’

Abigail was in the garden. A city garden, a Kensington garden, not a very large garden, not even very beautiful. Nevertheless, only money brought such things. The garden was money. Claiming to be uninterested in money, Matthew stood at the top of the iron steps down to the lawn and watched his wife playing with the cat. The sunlight made her dress very yellow against the green grass. The room behind him was high and cool, with elegant plaster work and old-fashioned calm. Had the day-long leisure of the pre-industrial rich really been as desperate as people said today, perhaps in order to excuse their present desperation?

Abigail existed to disprove them all. She was not in the least afraid of inactivity, of the small preoccupation, and she felt no moral qualms. She was filled by whatever she did. Now, playing with the cat, she shared its rightness, its energy, its precise adjustments … He went down the staircase to her, his hand trailing in the honeysuckle that had grown up around the cast-iron supports of the rail.

‘Tell me what you think of Gryphon,’ he said.

‘Come and sit down and get grass stains on your trousers.’

The cat crouched, glaring at Matthew’s feet as they approached, then was off through the bushes and over the wall.

‘You’re very beautiful this evening.’

‘So are you.’

She looked up at him and he kissed her, stooping, his hands on her breasts.

‘No –’

‘Whyever not?’

Her bright brown eyes looked up over his shoulder, at the upstairs windows of the house next door, just showing above the garden wall. He moved his hands up and held the curves of her skull in them, containing her thoughts in them, her mind.

‘You once said you’d gladly keep house for me in a bus shelter even.’

‘So I would.’

‘Fat lot of cuddling we’d get in a bus shelter.’

But he loved her unfashionable modesty.

She was silent. He knew, not through his fingers, that her thoughts were on the material wealth surrounding them. She disliked it, used it, disliked herself for using it, enjoyed it, feared it so that sometimes it almost stood between them. They’d never come anywhere near to the bus shelter, the shack that she obscurely felt would have ennobled them, and she blamed him for this easy success, this cheerful failure to be poor. A Roman Catholic, her attitudes were strangely puritanical. Yet she knew about poverty. All her life till she had met him she had been poor. He moved his fingers through her hair, close against the hard white bone.

‘I love you more than yesterday,’ he said.

They lay on the grass, just their hands touching. The sun was lowering, and Matthew half-dosed his eyes against its brilliance on the white stucco of the house behind them. There was a recent cherry tree, its stippled, shining bark exuding reddish anemones of resin. The garden itself was old and tired, with dusty figs growing against the south wall, nectarines, and a pear tree long barren. The woodwork of the greenhouse sagged: if Matthew repaired it technology would dictate extruded aluminum and anti-filter sheeting. So he left the dulled white paint to gather mold, and the glass to cloud over. The garden might have been claustrophobic, preserved falsely, feeding on itself. Instead it formed a starting point and a safe return.

‘I’m taking the Colindale job. It’ll mean moving house in a few days.’

‘Is that all it’ll mean?’ She leaned up on one elbow. ‘The work sounds so abstract. Your hold on reality is flimsy enough at the best of times.’

‘Plenty of studies have been done on closed academic communities. I’m sure they’ll be watching out.’

‘I feel uneasy, Matthew. That’s all.’

‘Besides, it looks as if I shall be having a strong outside interest.’ He stood up. ‘Let’s go indoors so that I can kiss you.’

They went up the curving staircase and in at the French windows. He kissed her. They stood together for so long that their shadow had time to move on the soft carpet within the room. He told her about what Gryphon had asked him to do. He repeated the question he had asked earlier.

‘Tell me what you think of Gryphon.’

‘I’d rather tell him to his face. He’s a bore.’ She smiled. ‘I suppose what I have most against him are the short cuts in his conversation. The more right they are, the more insulting. People should be allowed to progress at their own tempo.’

‘That’s funny. I find his assumptions of my intelligence flattering.’

‘They’re not meant to be. He only makes them to prove how even more intelligent he himself must be.’

‘That’s very uncharitable of you, love.’

‘He’s arrogant, Matthew. I can’t stand arrogance.’ She turned away from him. He thought how small she looked. ‘But you must do what he wants you to.’

‘If I’m found out it’ll finish me.’

‘Good.’ She turned back to him. ‘Finish you for what? For all this?’ She indicated the room, the garden, the town car, the long-haul car, the holidays, the space. ‘For all this?’

‘It might mean jail.’

‘I’d wait for you.’

‘You romanticize.’

‘God loves me. We’re never tested beyond our strength.’

Matthew thought of the millions in mental hospitals. God loved them too. Unfathomably.

‘I’ll take you out to see our new house in the morning,’ he said.

She walked away, went downstairs to prepare his dinner. It wasn’t that he needed to guard her faith. Years ago he’d lost the conceit that it depended on his protection, on the things he said or left unsaid. It existed in spite of, or perhaps because of … The front doorbell rang and he went to see who was there.

‘Police.’ Two men in slacks and bright shirts. ‘We’re looking for a Dr Oliver. Matthew Oliver.’

Matthew was wary. ‘I am he,’ he said.

‘Will you hear that?’ said the fatter of the two men. ‘The verb to be governing the dear old nominative after all these year. . .