Tom Avitabile - The Hammer of God

Meanwhile, at the UN meeting, Dr. Brodenchy was about to walk out of the room. He was sure that the Undersecretary General of the U.N. for Economic and Social Affairs must have been drinking. Otherwise, he was insane. Either way Brodenchy didn’t want any part of it.

Sensing the impossible position he was in, the undersecretary took the chance of his career. “What if I show you proof?”

That stopped Brodenchy. Now this bureaucrat was either pulling a prank or had misinterpreted something as “proof” of the outlandish claims he just made. His intellectual interest piqued, Brodenchy acceded.

“May I ask you to wait here while I make the necessary preparations?” the undersecretary said.

“Certainly,” Brodenchy said. He took a seat in the outer office. His mind raced with the implications to mankind if what he had just heard was true. Why had he never heard anything about this before? Furthermore, if it were a fact, why did they want him involved?

“Doctor, the Secretary will see us now.”

“The Secretary?” Brodenchy asked.

“The Secretary General of the United Nations, U Thant.”

A chill went through Brodenchy. U Thant was a world-respected figure. If he was buying into this nonsense, maybe there was something…

Peter had hit the mother lode. It was like taking candy from big babies. All he had to do was violate the sanctity of some computer room and within minutes he had them right in the palm of his hand. Peter was now firmly committed to his goal of actually building an older IBM 1401 computer from all the parts they threw at him. He’d have to talk his uncle Joe into giving him space in his garage. A 1401, even just the boards, was a big machine, too big for the three-room apartment in the two family house he, his parents, and brother now lived in.

Peter remembered the pinch in his nose that the computer room caused. It became the basis of his plan of attack. He’d go into a midtown skyscraper, press all the buttons on the elevator and at every floor, sniff the air. The clue Peter was sniffing for was the smell of acetate. It was the base layer of the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing’s magnetic tape that was unceasingly run at high speed past the heads on the big computer tape drives of the day. The odor was unmistakable, a little like vinegar, and a little like old galoshes. 3M used it because when they broke, acetate based tapes broke clean with no stretching, meaning they could be repaired by a simple splice of tape with no loss of data.

In the Pan Am building, Peter sniffed his way to two IBM 360 — 40s in one room. He walked off with a power supply compliments of an enamored computer engineer. At Lever House (IBM 360 -30) he got manuals and two register motherboards. Even at just a plain white building on 51st and Park, he smelled out an IBM 360-30 at a brokerage house and got to make up punch cards with his name on them. He had the idea to type in the alphabet and numbers 0–9 and get the whole alphanumeric card code right there in his hands. The largess from his little forays into corporate America was filling up his room in the Bronx — he’d better talk to Uncle Joe soon!

?§?

Brodenchy left the U.N. in a daze and checked in to a room at the Waldorf. He ordered room service and sat trying to figure out how to accomplish the outrageous mission he had just accepted. He had agreed to chair a committee that at this point had no one on it. The conundrum he faced was that someone had to be on the committee before he could tell that person what the committee was about. His fear was that once he told anyone, he would probably not want to be on it, or worse, suggest Brodenchy stop drinking. It didn’t take any part of his prodigious brain to figure out that this was not going to be easy. He needed some event or convincer to attract some of the greatest minds in the world onto his panel. That panel would then advise the world on something it would never believe. The more he thought about it, the more he doubted his own sanity.

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.”