R. MacAvoy - Tea with the Black Dragon

Rasmussen heaved his own bulk off the drafting stool. “She’ll call me once she’s settled in her new place. It always takes a month or so to let people know when you’ve moved. That’s a real problem when you’re self-employed. I know. Been there.”

He reached out to shake Mayland Long’s hand. Shaking hands was a ritual Floyd Rasmussen practiced whenever he could, and somehow his guest had begun their conversation without it. He succeeded in grabbing Long’s unresisting hand now, but there was something wrong in the gesture. This was not the usual wrongness which accompanies shaking hands: cold, wet palm, no strength in the grip, or too much. The hand he commandeered was dry and warm. It held his own securely, without squeezing the knuckles together. The wrongness was in the shape of it.

He dropped his eyes from the dusky face, but the hand had been withdrawn. Mayland Long was speaking.

“You have not asked what my interest is in Miss Macnamara. Aren’t you curious?”

Rasmussen looked up in surprise. “Your interest? You’re looking to use her, right? But you weren’t sure she was the engineer you needed. Peccola gave her sort of a lukewarm recommendation and you wanted a second opinion?”

Mayland Long smiled. It was not an English smile, but a Chinese smile. “Very close. I have need other, and am interested to know what she has been doing. I worry I may not find her in time.” He turned to leave.

“Well, I wouldn’t worry,” boomed Rasmussen down the hall. “Don’t… commit yourself to anything yet. She’ll show.”

Mr. Long found himself on Mathilda Avenue, feeling the even, flat, shadeless street and the reek of traffic as a relief after the force of Rasmussen’s joviality. He fingered the keys of his own car, a small green Citroen. He sifted among Rasmussen’s words. Gold and dross: how to tell one from the other? Turning the ignition key, his face meditative, he felt for the anger he had found within himself earlier.

It was still present, and it retained the same size and shape. Good. If he was to be angry, Mayland Long wanted that anger to de dependable.

Today there was no buzzing robot-car on the floor of Friendly Computers. Instead, Fred Frisch was involved in a lengthy discussion with a boy who appeared both too young and too poor to have business there. The subject of the dialogue was breadboards, a large assortment of which lay scattered across the counter. At least half the display machines along the wall were running, some throwing fantasies of color over their screens, while others flashed words. One unit emitted a monotonous beep, beep, beep as images of tiny rockets exploded into flame.

Mr. Long did not attempt to interrupt the conversation, but sat down in the same chair that Martha Macnamara had graced the previous morning. The repetitive, multi color display on the nearest video screen caught his interest. Mayland Long’s experience with computing was as extensive as the books in his library and existed on no other level. He pressed the return key tentatively.

The display vanished, leaving in its place a list of available games and instructions for invoking them. He conjured up something called simply Life.

The resultant display was impressive. Small cells of white grew over the screen from dots of his placing. These expanded like lichen, and like lichen died away in the middle. Mr. Long grasped the mathematics of it, and also the metaphor. His eyes watched tiny colonies grow, proliferate, compete with one another for space, fail through mysterious inner processes, die… Like societies of men.

It was a game he was quite familiar with, watching mankind from a distance: civilizations, tribes, individuals… As always, he felt a desire to interfere.

He focused on one white speck, no different from any of its fellows. It was one of the rare stable ones, situated in a small pulsing colony. It might continue forever, or at least until the next power failure.

But wait—no. At the far edge of the screen a small, odd-shaped colony was moving sideways. A glider. It left the screen at the right and re-entered from the far left. Its path was going to impact the pulsar in… how many moves?

Mayland Long worked the puzzle in his mind. He saw each move that would bring the attacker toward the small colony. He constructed the impact, and saw in foresight the end of that tiny dot of light, no different from any other on the screen.

He sat motionless and watched, his eyes black, his face impassive. But a moment before the glider intersected the stable colony, his hand struck the keyboard of the computer, freezing the action.

“Live,” he whispered to the dot of light.

He heard movement behind him. Frisch stood there, dangling a green plastic board from his nervous hands. “Ever play that before?” he asked. “Life?”

Long looked around him at the empty store. “Not this… implementation.”

“I suppose everyone’s got one,” the young man admitted. “But this one’s faster. Most of them are written in BASIC. Would you believe that?”

Long did not answer. He stretched out an arm, found another plastic tub chair and pulled it into position beside his own.

Obediently, Frisch sat. “You haven’t found her, I guess.”

Mayland Long smiled ruefully. “Progress has been retrograde. I have now lost the mother.”

Frisch stared. “Maybe she gave up and went home.”

“If she did, she left her luggage behind.” Long’s gesture made circles in the air.

“Mr. Frisch…”

“Fred.”

“Will you answer me a few more questions? I realize you’re busy and I’m a bother…”

Frisch bit his lower lip and pulled on his moustache. “I’m not busy,” he admitted. “And I don’t mind talking. But as I said yesterday, I don’t really know Liz.”

“These are technical questions. You see, I value the breadth of your interest. You understand both methodology and personality. I imagine you know Floyd Rasmussen.”

“RasTech,” answered Frisch promptly, responding to the flattery with innocent eagerness. “I don’t know him, though. Just about him.”

“Go on, please. I know him, you see, but do not know about him.”

The young shop owner took a deep breath. “Rasmussen. He’s a mover. Sharp. Not a technical man, but a great entrepreneur. He’s made a lot of money.”

“On his own?”

Frisch nodded affirmation. “He’s started half-a-dozen firms in the last ten years.”

“Then why was he working for FSS in the position of department manager last year?”

“Oh, he’s lost a lot of money, too. His last couple of ideas went bust: small business systems.’“ Frisch began intensive demolition work upon his moustache, his eyes puckered, staring through the blank window of his shop at the street beyond.

“But I don’t think he was personally hurt either time—just the stockholders. Only I imagine it’s hard to find any more capital after two Chapter Elevens.”

“Evidently he has managed,” interjected Mr. Long. He sighed and murmured, “Interesting.

“Tell me… Fred. Why would a bank want to hire an engineer to write half a security system?”

There was no hesitation in Fred’s reply. “So the right hand won’t know what the left hand is doing. It’s often done that way. Like for the little plastic cards they use nowadays. You know? Supposedly no one knows the algorithm by which the card code is evolved out of the account number, or the customer’s name. That’s because two programmers wrote it. Each knows half.

“A bank’ll go to a lot of trouble to randomize the choice, hiring one man on this end of the country and one in New York, taking two or even three programmers out of different segments of the field—industry, research, schools.”