“Ah—Fleming. No more indiscretions, I hope.”
Fleming scowled the length of the table at him.
“I’ve had my mouth shut, if that’s what you mean.”
“It is.” Ratcliff smiled charmingly and passed on to Watling.
“We’ll try not to take too much of each other’s time, shall we?” He raised his fine Roman head and looked down the table to Reinhart. “You have some more news for us, Professor?”
Reinhart coughed diffidently on to his little white hand.
“Dr. Fleming here has made an analysis.”
“Excuse me,” Mrs. Tate-Allen beamed, “but I don’t think Mr. Newby here is entirely in the picture.”
Mr. Newby was a small, thin man who looked used to humiliation.
“Oh, well,” said Ratcliff, “perhaps you’d fill in the background, Osborne.”
Osborne filled it in.
“And now?”
Twenty pairs of eyes, including the Minister’s, turned to Fleming.
“We know what it is,” said Fleming.
“Well done!” said Mrs. Tate-Allen.
“What is it?”
Fleming looked levelly at the Minister.
“It’s a computer program,” he said quietly.
“A computer program? Can you be sure about that?”
Fleming merely nodded. Everyone else talked.
“Please!” said Osborne, banging his fist on the table. The hubbub subsided. Mrs. Tate-Allen held up a blue-gloved hand.
“I’m afraid, Minister, some of us don’t know what a computer program is.”
Fleming explained, while Reinhart and Osborne sat back and breathed relief. The boy was behaving well.
“Have you tried it in a computer?” asked Mrs. Tate-Allen.
“We’ve used computers to break it down. We’ve nothing that’ll take all of it.” He tapped the papers in front of him. “This is simply vast.”
“If you had access to a bigger computer—” Osborne suggested.
“It isn’t only size. It is, in fact, more than just a program.”
“What is it then?” Vandenberg asked, settling more comfortably into his chair. It was going to be a long business.
“It’s in three sections.” Fleming arranged his papers as if that would make it clearer. “The first part is a design—or rather, it’s a mathematical requirement which can be interpreted as a design. The second part is the programme proper, the order code as we call it. The third and last part is data—information sent for the machine to work on.”
“I’d be glad of an opportunity...” Vandenberg extended a hand and the papers were passed to him. “I don’t say you’re wrong. I’d like our signals people to check your methodology.”
“You do that,” said Fleming. There was a respectful hush as the papers were handed up the table, but Mrs. Tate-Allen evidently felt that some comment was required.
“I must say, this is very interesting.”
“Interesting!” Fleming looked explosive. Reinhart laid a restraining hand on his sleeve. “It’s the most important thing that’s happened since the evolution of the brain.”
“All right, John,” said Reinhart. The Minister passed it over.
“What do you want to do next?”
“Build a computer that’ll handle it.”
“Are you seriously proposing,” the Minister spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully, as though they were chocolates out of an assorted box, “that some other beings, in some distant part of the galaxy, who have never had any contact with us before, have now conveniently sent us the design and programme for the kind of electronic machine—”
“Yes,” said Fleming.
The Minister sailed on: “Which we happen to possess on this earth?”
“We don’t possess one.”
“We possess the type, if not the model. Is it likely?”
“It’s what happened.”
Fleming made a dubious impression on the meeting. They had often seen it before: dedicated young scientists, obstinate and peevish, impatient of committee processes, and yet to be treated with great patience because they might have something valuable on them. These easily caricaturable officials were not fools; they were used to assessing people and situations. Much would depend on what Vandenberg and Osborne and Reinhart thought. Ratcliff enquired of the Professor.
“Arithmetic’s universal,” said Reinhart. “Electronic computing may well be.”
“It may be the only form of computing, in the last analysis,” put in Fleming.
Vandenberg looked up from the papers.
“I wonder—”
“Look,” Fleming interrupted. “The message is being repeated all the time. If you’ve a better idea, you go and work on it.”
Reinhart glanced uneasily across at Osborne, who was watching the state of play like a scorer at a cricket match.
“You can’t use an existing machine?” Osborne asked.
“I said!”
“It seems a reasonable enough question,” the Minister observed mildly. Fleming turned on him passionately.
“This programme is simply enormous. I don’t think you realise.”
“Just explain, John,” Reinhart said.
Fleming took a breath and continued more calmly. “If you want a computer to play you a decent game of draughts, it has to be able to accept a programme of around five thousand order groups. If you want it to play chess—and you can; I’ve played chess with computers—you have to feed in about fifteen thousand orders. To handle this material,” he waved towards the papers in front of Vandenberg, “you need a computer that can take in a thousand million, or, more accurately, tens of thousands of millions of numbers, before it can even start work on the data.”
At last he had the meeting with him: this was a glimpse of a brain they could respect.
“It’s surely a matter of assembling enough units,” Osborne said.
Fleming shook his head.
“It isn’t just size; it needs a new conception. There’s no equipment on earth...” He searched his mind for an example, and they waited attentively until he found one. “Our newest computers still work in microseconds. This is a machine that must operate in milli-microseconds, otherwise we’d all be old men by the time it got round to processing the whole of the vast quantity of data. And it would need a memory—probably a low temperature memory—at least with the capacity of the human brain, and far more efficiently controlled.”
“Is this proven?” asked Ratcliff.
“What do you expect? We have to get the means to prove it first. Whatever intelligence sent this message is way ahead of us. We don’t know why they sent it, or to whom. But it’s something we couldn’t do. We’re just homo sapiens, plodding along. If we want to interpret it—” He paused. “If...”
“This is theory, isn’t it?”
“It’s analysis.”
The Minister appealed once more to Reinhart.
“Do you think it could be proved?”
“I can prove it,” said Fleming.
“I was asking the Professor.”
“I can prove it by making a computer that will handle it,” said Fleming, undeterred. “That’s what’s intended.”
“Is that realistic?”
“It’s what the message is asking for.”
The Minister began to lose patience. He drummed his square fingers on the table.
“Professor?”
Reinhart considered, not so much what he believed, but what to say.
“It would take a long time.”
“But it’s what is wanted?”
“Possibly.”
“I shall need the best available computer to work with,” said Fleming, as though it were all agreed. “And the whole of our present team.”