Galactic Storm, page 1
Galactic Storm
Gateway/Orion – December 2020
(originally Curtis Warren – October 1951)
John Brunner
(as by Gill Hunt)
Chapter One
"Charlie"
THEY FETCHED Sharp out the other day, a doddering, maundering white-haired imbecile of thirty, who, supported by two white-coated doctors, waved fatuously and laughed at the milling crowds under his balcony. I'm not sure some people didn't weep; at any rate the silence was like a pall when they realised that this wreck was the Saviour of Mankind, decorated by six heads of government with their own hands. Yes, that was the part that got published. What didn't get published was how ill the second of those ministers was after he left the room.
I know that, because I was there. You see, I know Sharp before he—saved the world. Before he stopped being Sharp, from sheer horror. I was his best friend.
It was an odd friendship, ours. I and he were in college together. He worked at science and played with meteorology, and held an amateur pilot's licence. I worked at languages and wrote strange moody dark verses that kept being sent back by the New Poetry and other magazines. I spoke Spanish and French well enough to get by, and I could read German with a dictionary. His madness for meteorology—I said he played with it, but it grew to be an obsession, and he dreamed of perfect weather forecast and wanted better control of weather itself—was as unattractive to me as my favourite Bunk Johnson and Beethoven records were to him. Interesting, but nothing to get het up over.
Yet we somehow took to doing things together, telling each other an occasional fact about ourselves, even to helping each other with work. He with his analytical brain—God, what a mind the world lost when he went mad—ate my arguments up, digested them and came up with the weak points. I polished up his literary style, criticised his ways of speech.
It was that sweltering day ten years ago that still holds the record for heat all down the Atlantic sea-board when it began. Those days people still thought the moon was beyond our reach. Now that I've been offered a free holiday on Mars by the Government I wonder how people, including myself, were ever so stupid. But I digress.
In those days Sharp was a tall lean guy with a face that looked like it had argued with a bulldozer and perhaps won, because it was square and regular but not good-looking. He had golden hair which he never brushed, and wore the most incredible clothes. His shirt that morning was purple and gold, wide open because of the heat. We were still three days away from summer vacation, and he was due to leave then. I was staying for an extra year.
I was letting a sickly commercial seep into my ear from a portable radio and not bothering much about the world, when he flung the door of my room open, looking slightly hotter and more bothered than usual. I tuned out the commercial and wondered what the hell he wanted. It came.
"Paul," he announced, (that's me, Paul Shay), "I want you to help me predict some weather."
"Nuts," I told him, "If you do that I'll make you take up the violin in retaliation. I can't help you with your weather." So I turned over and ignored him.
"But this," he enunciated rather carefully, "is big stuff."
"Meteorology's all stuff," I told him dreamily.
He shook my shoulder angrily. "Paul," he insisted, "I want to use Charlie."
That made me sit up! Charlie—well, Charlie cost three million and a few odd thousand, plus an unspecified amount of subsidy from the Government. Charlie is off limits except to authorised personnel. Charlie is the big mechanical brain, the one that solved all Einstein's problems over again in four hours flat, using the revalued speed of light. And as I said is off limits to everybody. Strictly it's the property of the university, but the people who use it are mostly ballistics experts from New Mexico, because it happens to be convenient to the university.
Sharp was looking at me cynically. He grinned. I stumble-tongued. He enjoyed my astonishment for some time before he added, "I talked old Masters into letting me run through a little problem. Well, it's not as little as I told him, but still, there it is. So what you, my friend, have to do is to help me code it. Read out these." He proffered a great wad of papers, all of three inches thick, that turned out to be the most astonishingly heterogeneous collection of weather reports and etceteras I ever set eyes on. Beside temperature, rainfall and so on, he had heaped in ozone content of the atmosphere, a dozen complicated carbon cycles that meant nothing whatsoever to me, lord alone knows how many years' reports of coastal erosion, sea level, atmospheric pressure and frequency of cyclones. And more beside.
"Little problem!" I exploded. "How long will this little lot take Charlie?"
"All of thirteen hours," he told me complacently.
I looked for a long time at the pile of information he had given me. Then I remembered how he had helped me index my record collection, all two hundred sixty discs of it, earlier on. So I got up resignedly, and agreed.
We spent all the afternoon codifying those pages of figures. Sharp had to digest them into a peculiar language of his own that it seemed Charlie had to be spoonfed with, and wrote the results on an immense paper spool that was to give the whole thing into the brain. We laid off for coffee later, and wound up the lot at two a.m.
I read him the last six digits, twice to be sure, and threw the last sheet on the pile beside me. I rolled my eyes at the ceiling and inquired quite politely, "Now just what the hell is that going to prove?"
He wouldn't tell me. And I knew too much to think twice of pressing him. He had a good reason for shutting me up, obviously, so I swallowed my curiosity, dragged myself to my feet and followed him across the edge of the black campus—fortunately nobody was around—and began slowly plodding the two hundred yards to Charlie's kennel, a square concrete blockhouse without windows, with only one door, and a ferocious bulldog of a janitor.
The latter wasn't pleased at being fetched up at two in the morning. What we heard was a bellow and a rattle from the little house beside the kennel, and a string of colorful imprecations. Sharp had to produce written permission from Masters, the professor who usually looks after Charlie, and explain, before the janitor surlily undid the four heavy switches inside his house. There is a magnetic lock on the door of the kennel which weighs about two tons.
The interior was dark and uninviting. I shivered and started reciting morbid verse about tombs and vampires under my breath, while I heard the janitor's hoarse gruff voice say, "I hope you know how to make the bloody thing work?" and Sharp assured him that he did and could get results. After a certain amount of palaver the former returned to his interrupted repose, while Sharp came up beside me and felt for the light switch.
The unreliable popping of the mercury lamps revealed the controls of Charlie. It looked like the intestines of a beast. Before the tubes settled down to steady work, I'd already gotten an impression of the miles of cable and the thousands of valves that went into the building of this near-intelligence.
"Almost human, except for its total lack of imagination," Sharp said light-heartedly. He pulled down row after row of switches on the main control board. Charlie can be operated solo—by one man.
"Not so different from some humans at that," I cracked, in spite of the cold air inside the kennel. Concrete sides make for quick radiation of heat. It was damned near uncomfortable in there.
Sharp said nothing. He fed the spool of paper on which we had laboriously transcribed that three-inch wad of data, and set the tiny motor going that would reel it in. It was with some awe that I saw the spinning axles lead the problem in for solution.
There was a large section of the control board consisting entirely of lights. Yellow lights indicated the stages the problem had reached. After one had gone on, there was a sudden flash and the red one corresponding lit up. Sharp immediately snapped off the brain and reversed the winding motor.
"What is it?" I inquired. I'd never seen Charlie close to before.
"Charlie's like most people. He hates to get up. First two or three times you're liable to get a mistake before you're under way. That's what the red light means." He let the problem run in again. This time the third stage was glowing yellow before the red lamp went on. Sharp swore, but patiently re-reeled the paper a second time. He glanced at the four-foot dial of the electric clock at the far end.
"We're running it close," he murmured. "Charlie may take more than thirteen hours at this little caper. There's another problem—an official one about a californium bomb, I hear—due in at three p.m. tomorrow for solution. It took me a solid hour to talk Masters into letting me use the brain at all." Here he got the spool turning again for the third time. Now a smooth warm hum filled the room, and Sharp heaved a sigh of relief. "He's working," he said, and lit himself a cigarette on the strength of it.
I was not too tired to be interested in the workings of Charlie. Not being of the absolutely latest type, though very fast, there were all kinds of entertaining whirrings and little lights, showing where the answer was now. After about ten minutes, though, this bored me. I said as much.
"You'd better grab some sleep," Sharp replied. "I'd like you to keep an eye on this dohinkus tomorrow. If it starts blowing a fuze, or glowing pink or shooting equations out the door, fetch me. But I can't watch it all day as well as all night."
I inquired, "Is something liable to go wrong?" and tried to smother a yawn.
"Well," Sharp said, tilting his cigarette up to an angle of sixty degrees, "we've got, I suppose, about eight hundred simultaneous factors in this problem. Last time th
I blinked at him. He seemed quite sane and matter-of-fact. "Do you have three thousand handy to pay off?"
A grin half dropped his cigarette. He retrieved it. "They improved it a lot after that," he explained. "They've been feeding six hundred regularly in big ballistics problems—guided missiles. They need meteorology and atmospherics as well as plain ballistics nowadays." He blew a lot of smoke. "Interesting thing, weather."
"You said that before," I reminded him. "About ninety-nine times."
He hadn't paid any attention. He went on, looking up at the ceiling. "Did you know they once tried to keep track of the weather here in the States, using forty keyboard calculators? They were a day behind before they got started! But Charlie here," and he glanced affectionately at the purring brain, "is worth all those humans and more. This little weather problem of ours—"
"Thanks for that 'ours'," I interpolated drily. He ignored me.
"—is slightly more complicated than forecasting tomorrow's weather accurately. Not much. But even Charlie would be about six hours behind if he got around to to-the-minute forecasts. Prediction is a matter of so many elements—"
It was about here I stopped taking any interest. We'd been there, I suppose, close on half an hour and there were six yellow lights on the board, out of nearly a hundred, when I woke up to the fact that the sixth red lamp was also shining. A tiny shrill bell rang, simultaneous with my noticing it.
Sharp jerked upright and swore very bitterly. He snapped down a dozen switches and stood staring angrily at the dumb calculator. "That's really torn it," he said acidly. "That means we'll overrun our time on it." He consulted his watch, checked it by the big clock. "By at least a quarter hour," he added.
I didn't understand his anxiety, then. To me he was merely a child turned loose with a glorified toy. How wrong I was! So I said, to humour him, "Can't you just run back to the stage before?"
His face brightened. "I could try that," he admitted. He ran the rewinder motor until the problem should have been just at the sixth stage. He switched on. Nothing happened.
In the end he shrugged lightly and said, "Then the problem of the californium bomb will just have to wait." And he sent the whole reel back to the beginning.
I left him with doubts for his sanity, and went to bed, cursing Charlie and him with equal venom. I slept fitfully, and dreamed of vast rainstorms and colossal heat, so hot that in my sleep I tossed off all my blankets, and panted, in spite of the fact that the warmth of the day had given way to a night of near cold. I know now that my telepathy must have been on the job, and very grateful I am to that telepathic sensitivity I have too; but I anticipate myself. That comes later.
In the morning I had nothing to do, almost literally. The end of the year was dead quiet for me, because I never belonged to a fraternity or anything. After breakfast, therefore, I went along to Charlie's kennel and found Sharp, very bright-eyed but obviously dead beat, checking a sample test of figures from the thirty-third stage. He was full of insults for the annoying red light that had wasted a half hour, but otherwise cheerful, as the hospitals say.
I'm grateful to that mistake, really. Because if Charlie hadn't overrun the time allotted to the problem. Sharp wouldn't have found a kindred spirit in Honey Hayling. I'll tell you how it happened.
I talked Sharp, as I thought, into going to sleep for a couple of hours and leaving me to watch Charlie for any mistakes. He didn't want to.
I turned on the heat at that point, and he consented reluctantly.
"But mind you," he added, relighting his cigarette—not the same one, but at least his fiftieth, if one could judge by the stubs on the floor—"if anything goes wrong you'll be responsible."
I assured him I would, chased him away, heaved a sigh of relief and sat down in the sharp-cornered chair in front of the control board to read. Unfortunately the tale I chose to read was Wells's "The Star", and the descriptions in it only gave me the willies by reminding me of my uncomfortable nightmares. Sharp's feverish thinking must have soaked the kennel till it was a telepathic sparking-box.
The warm hum from Charlie got on my nerves too, and the air was nearly stifling because the sun was getting high by now. At midday I'd be sweating. But Sharp should be back before then.
I forced myself away from the immediate surroundings and lost myself in Wells, having nothing better to do. When I'd read for about an hour, I got the shock of my life when I spotted a brief flicker from the seventieth red lamp, but it must have been a short, because the yellows had scarcely yet reached forty, and so I heaved a sigh or two of relief and went on reading.
Soon after eleven I got up and started inspecting the brain from close to. It was really interesting for a while, because, as I said, Charlie clacked entertainingly, flashed lights, and so on. I pressed the sample switch at random, and after a few moments a piece of paper came out with a digest of the problem so far. It was gibberish to me, full of integrals and symbols for chemical compounds and fantastic numbers.
I screwed it up and threw it away. Soon after that Sharp came up the path to the kennel, crunching gravel. He called cheerfully to the janitor, and entered. In his arms were three or four works on geology and one on astronomy, plus an elementary textbook of chemistry. He piled them on the floor before he spoke to me.
"I had my sleep," he said, cheerfully still. "I also ordered you some lunch along at Barty's Grill. And I want to be left alone."
I raised my eyebrows, followed suit with my shoulders, decided that my suspicions about his sanity were well-founded, and inquired, "What did you order me?"
"Cold chicken, green salad and sundae," Sharp said without interest. "Get out." He was squatting on the hard floor, in preference to the equally hard chair, and opening his geology books. I looked at the page he was reading, but since it meant just about as much to me as a page out of Racine would have meant to him I gave up and strolled away.
Chapter Two
"The Hot Globe"
I WENT DOWN to Barty's Grill and ate my lunch, and then looked up a friend of mine who was leaving at the end of the semester. I spent ten minutes in conversation with him over a cup of coffee, and then sauntered back towards Charlie's kennel at about two ten p.m. One important thing issued from this conversation. I learnt that the Government representative who was coming down over this californium bomb problem was both Honey Hayling and this guy's uncle.
Which slice of information proved one hundred per cent invaluable. This is how it happened so.
The sun was immensely hot. I winced as it hit me, but made bravely on until I was halfway across the campus and nearly walked into Masters, whom I mentioned above. Professor in charge of Charlie.
He said chestily, in his bass voice that rocked the neighbourhood, "Has your friend Sharp finished with the calculator yet, the young rip?"
I blinked. "I thought he had it until three this afternoon," I said in surprise.
Masters coughed. "I may have been a little optimistic," he said. "The representative of the Government has already arrived and wants the use of the brain right away."
That worried me. I said rather faintly, "But Sharp's relying on having it until three. He's nothing like through."
"In heaven's name," said Masters in another earth-shaking burst of eloquence, "what's the ass trying to solve?"
I said I didn't know, which, failed to satisfy the old man. In the end I had to admit he'd said it was more complicated than trying to give up-to-the-minute weather forecasts, and Masters about-faced and returned across the campus. His voice came to me over his shoulder suddenly.
"He's liable to be obstinate, eh? You're his best friend hey? Then you'd better come talk him into giving up his precious project."
I spotted my opportunity with alacrity. If the representative was Honey Hayling, maybe I could do something for Sharp. Honey's nephew practically worshipped me—hitherto this characteristic had been a nuisance, but now it might be turned to good account. So when the professor pointed to a shiny brown Buddleigh saloon and said the fat man in untidy clothes beside it was Honey Hayling, I at once strode up to him and offered my hand, saying, "Good afternoon, sir. My name's Paul Shay, and I'm a friend of your nephew's."
