David McDaniel - The Final Affair

They stared.

"A long-range project was begun some three years ago," he continued, reaching for his humidor, "while you were short-circuiting a nasty situation in the Middle East. I'm sure you remember that week."

"Clearly," said Illya.

"You went there from England after meeting that Rainbow chap."

"That business about the robbery was never settled either, was it?" said Napoleon. "That whole affair seemed unresolved, I always felt. We were off our stride."

"We did well enough in the war afterwards, I thought," said Illya.

"Your work there was most satisfactory," their commander said. "But your final report from London, filed between assignments, included information which correlated with some anomalous data we'd received from other sources and made me willing to invest some effort to take advantage of the revealed situation." His pipe now packed, he searched for a match. "If you have nothing pressing, I would like to explain at length."

"Here we have Thrush Central, housing the Ultimate Computer and in constant communication by remote terminal with every Satrap in the world. And over here, several thousand miles away, is a complete duplicate set of hardware, with most of the files copied on its tapes, warmed up and waiting With a staff of forty or fifty sitting around playing cards. And thirdly, yet another full set of staff and equipment is en route from one location to another, where they will reassemble and activate their own Thrush Central. With consideration of several constantly changing factors, probably including a random variable generated within the Computer itself, on a given signal everyone in the second, or stand-by, Central assumes their stations and all available communications channels are utilised at high speed to transfer every remaining bit of information from the first set of machinery into the second. Simultaneously, all functioning channels are switched to the second site, which then becomes Thrush Central, and the third unit goes to stand-by status.

"This accomplished, the first group packs up everything – Section Three tells me all their equipment is modularised and containerised . Loathsome neologisms." He sucked at his pipe and sweet blue clouds rose around him. "They load into trucks, onto railroad cars, aircraft or boats like a travelling theatrical, troupe and are carried to another location, also chosen by the Computer, where they set up, realign and test the entire system, and signal that they are ready to assume stand-by status.

"Sometime after this, the active Central transfers control to the third full unit, which went on stand-by when the second took over. At this point the first would become the stand-by unit while the second broke down and moved to another location. Do you follow me so far?"

"This is more or less what Johnnie Rainbow outlined to us, sir," said Napoleon.

"With the omission of the fact that the second unit already has all basic data and programs, copied into its storage banks when it went to stand-by," Illya added. "Takes much less time to update, since they only have to copy the active files."

"Our best estimates are that Central can perform a complete tranferral without dropping a decimal in well under sixty seconds in an emergency situation. Since any of the three units is capable of carrying the full operating load of Thrush indefinitely, it can sustain activities until the one in transit is ready to resume stand-by operation… Presumably, if a unit were actually discovered and destroyed, it would take some time to replace the staff and hardware, but they could easily field a new functional unit within two or three weeks."

"Because all we can capture is the physical machinery which houses the information and the programs," said Illya. "The software can skip to anywhere in the world at the speed of light and leave us with blank iron oxide for all our trouble."

Napoleon raised an eyebrow. "You sound positively metaphysical," he said. "This is the spirit of the machine, and it is not bounded by physical laws."

"Oh, but it is," said Illya, "Like any spirit, it's not much without a body to work through. All we have- to do -is capture all of its bodies, which are comparatively valueless, or prevent it from departing the ones we do capture. Remember, you were the one who suggested the metaphor."

"I'm sorry. But I believe Mr. Waverly hadn't quite gotten to the core of his story. Thrush Central is as shifty as Percy Blakeney. Do you mean you have it located?"

"Not exactly. You see, something as large as Thrush Central requires several things in whatever site it may inhabit – besides open space and privacy, there must be electrical power, supplies of water, ready access to routes of escape by land, sea or air, and preferably enough innocent citizens coming and going in their immediate vicinity to cloak their-own movements… this sort of thing. We had quite a search for qualified locations, and found a few that looked very likely indeed.

"Now I would be the last to demean Thrush security. We could not stake out a location and expect Thrush to move into'.it; any concealed transmitter would betray itself by its own emissions. Section Eight wasn't fazed by the challenge, as you might have guessed – they created a self-contained recording device which was undetectable in operation, totally shielded, signal-activated, with a capacity of nearly 1500 hours in two dozen multiplexed channels.

Lovely device. There were planted in a number of locations identified as likely sites for Thrush Central, in such ways as to evade detection by sounding, stress analysis, fluoroscopy or magnetic anomaly.

"The recording device was sensitive to speech sounds, of course; it also monitored a wide range of frequencies and was designed to pick up certain types of signal flow by induction. The actual detection and storage techniques used are, I am told, quite sophisticated.

"The site was monitored circumspectly, by observation of water and electric power consumption; when both rose significantly to a six-week plateau and then dropped again, we waited a short period and then moved in to retrieve our bug."

"You mean it has already worked?" asked Illya.

"So far, yes. The original recording has been undergoing extensive analysis for over a month, and our own computer staff now feels capable of establishing communication with the Ultimate Computer, given two more things, which we hope you will be able to secure for us."

"Following which," said Napoleon, "you expect to be able to tap directly into Thrush's brain?"

"Literally."

"I'm staggered," said Illya. "What is it we need?"

"My decision to act was spurred by the information that the San Francisco Satrap is about to have his obsolescent terminal replaced by a newer model.

With Mr. Stevens' help, we should be able to divert the old terminal to our own uses. Even so, we will also need one piece of information to go with it. Since all communication is routinely scrambled, an active terminal is maintained in synchonisation with the Ultimate Computer. Any attempt to engage through an unsynchronised terminal would set off a flock of alarms and the self-destruct mechanism in the terminal itself. Nevertheless, since humanity is fallible, occasionally interlock is lost. And a provision has been made for such an…(eventuality: there is a maintenance access code which, properly entered, 'allows re-establishment of synchonisation and identifies its user as a qualified entity for access to operational systems as well as to all data files."

"You promised," said Napoleon, "that we wouldn't have to have anything to do with Ward Baldwin."

"I said you would not be expected to contact him. Now it is even more imperative that he remain unaware of your presence. In all your activities, wherever you might be observed, avoid attracting any attention."