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 alphanumeric 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 fo r 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.