Before room service arrived, he reached out to three of the men who he had escaped Hungary with. They would at least give him a straight answer as to whether he was sane or not. Maybe even help him sign up committee members. After a quiet dinner and some very good port, compliments of the U.N., he settled down to a restful night’s sleep.
Peter decided it was time to see what RCA could contribute to his cause. Although their computers weren’t as commonplace in 1968 as the big four, they still made them and they had parts. Peter walked towards the big tall letters RCA, seventy stories up from 6th Avenue in Manhattan. This was a huge building. People were taking guided tours of the lobby. It smelled of steam heat and plaster. As he approached the bank of elevators, Peter met his greatest challenge ever: elevator men. These weren’t automated elevators with push buttons; the elevator operators were people who could stop him cold. What to do?
The building directory was a study in itself. Peter spent twenty minutes looking for the right listing. Then he found it.
“Accounting on the 10th floor,” Peter said to the uniformed elevator operator. Other people were already on and others followed, each calling out their floor. Peter was tall for his age but he prayed no one took a real good look at him, at least not until he was on the computer floor. Then he’d have them, once again, mesmerized by the computer.
This elevator only served the first ten floors of the building. At three, a few people got off, and one got on and said, “Five please.”
At four, someone said, “Thank you, Charlie.”
At five, the doors opened and there it was: the pinching in his nose. He made the instant decision to get off there. As the people left the elevator area, he stayed behind. He walked a little in each direction like a hound dog on a scent. He went left. He found himself walking down long corridors of offices. When the hallway made a sharp right, he followed it. The rug on the floor became a hard vinyl floor. The walls were now blue-ish. The hallways became shorter and made more turns as he kept going. Having turned a corner, he came across a huge glass window behind which was the biggest tape drive he’d ever seen in his life. The tape that it used was wider than the 1/2” tape IBM used, even wider than the 3/4” Honeywell used. He stood in awe with his face up against the glass. There were no vacuum columns, which acted like shock absorbers to fast jerky moves of the tape. That must mean this machine doesn’t have sequential address.
Two things happened simultaneously. The first was that he noticed a black-and-white monitor on the drive. On it was Dean Martin. It was a surreal experience for Peter. Being in an Italian-American family there were two things you did without question — you went to church every Sunday at ten in the morning and you watched “The Dean Martin Show” every Thursday night at ten. Peter knew the show well enough to know that the guy standing next to Dino was Frank Gorshin, who played the Riddler on “Batman.” It was then Peter knew he was looking into a time machine. Frank Gorshin was going to be the guest star on this Thursday night’s show and here he was watching them at 11:30 in the morning on Tuesday. Wow!
Then the other thing happened. A hand came down on his shoulder. Accompanied by, “What are you doing here?” in a foreign accent.
Peter did a slow pan and to his relief saw that the arm was in a white shirt and not a uniform. Doing the fastest thinking of his life he said, “I am here to sell you something.”
“You are?”
“Yes. You see, I built a computer and, in it, I use a sequential access tape drive. And I figured you could use it to put all your news stories on and then you can play them back in any order you want to… here at NBC.”
For a moment, the man took in the kid holding the attaché case. “We don’t need that.”
“Oh.” Peter feigned disappointment and was ready to exit quickly with a line like, “Well, Sorry to bother you, bye,” when the man surprised him.
“Come on; I’ll show you.”
Brodenchy met his fellow political refugees at the Thames Coffee shop on 44th Street, just east of Madison Ave. Hellerman, who was always a sickly sort back in Europe, looked good and healthy. He was now a consultant for Fairchild Corporation working on missile guidance packages. To the degree that he could, Brodenchy explained the unexplainable to his compatriot. Hellerman agreed to lend his name, sight unseen, if Brodenchy thought it was legitimate enough. Brodenchy thanked him for the proxy and they discussed the issue of security. It was Hellerman’s feeling that if the committee was going to be dealing with top-secret matters, it should have a core of security to protect not only its findings but also its members. Only one name came up, only one person they had both trusted and would trust again with their lives. Kasiko Halman. Like Brodenchy, Hellerman had heard he was working in New York. He had an idea where.
There were three radio studios all behind glass. Peter and the man entered the one on the far end. He saw rows of tape recorders and racks of equipment. There was a huge console with big knobs and meters. Two huge record turntables and more tape machines book-ended a man working the controls, but that wasn’t what caught Peter’s attention and had him riveted. Behind two panes of tilted glass, wearing an open collared, white, short-sleeved shirt, looking down at a piece of paper in his hands through thick glasses, was Chet Huntley! The NBC microphone poised by the bridge of his nose wasn’t necessary for Peter to know that he was the anchorman for NBC. Well, half the anchorman. The other guy was David Brinkley. But here he was twenty feet away from Peter. The man operating the big console pointed his finger at Huntley as a light went on that read ON-AIR over the doorway and then Peter heard the famous voice.
“This is NBC Monitor News on the Hour. I’m Chet Huntley reporting.”
“Wow!” was all Peter could muster.
His host, not phased one iota by all this, said, “So you see we put every story on these carts.” The man held up a grey plastic Fidel-a-Pac cartridge that looked just like an eight-track tape. Only this one had a clear top and you could see the tape spooling around in a loop inside.
Peter caught on quickly. “Oh, so that’s actually Random Access. Much better than Sequential Access.”
There was a pause and Peter figured “the tour” was over.
“You hungry?” the man said.
“Me? Sure!”
“Okay, come back to my office for a second then we’ll go up to the commissary and grab a bite.”
Peter tried hard to remain cool, but the Commissary was the place that Johnny Carson made jokes about almost every night. Now Peter was going to have lunch there. First, he saw Chet Huntley, now he was going to have lunch with Johnny Carson! This was turning into one incredible day. He stole one last peek at Chet behind the glass as they left.
It was about to get even better.
It was a short walk down the hall to the place where the man worked. Peter noticed the room number 523 and another big glass window. In this room, there was no radio equipment, though. Instead, the room had rows of Teletype machines all noisily clattering and ka-chunking away.