Fred Hoyle - The Black Cloud

“I see, a pleasant place to live in, no military to badger you, no secrecy. And how was the team recruited?”

“Simply by indiscretions in the right quarters, like the letter to Alexandrov. What could be more natural than that everyone should be brought here who might have learned anything from me? I did play one dirty trick, and it still lies on my conscience. Sooner or later you will meet a charming girl who plays the piano extremely well. You will meet an artist, an historian, other musicians. It seemed to me that incarceration at Nortonstowe for over a year would be quite intolerable if there were only scientists here. So I arranged the appropriate indiscretions. Don’t breathe a word of this, Geoff. In the circumstances I think perhaps I was justified. But it’s better they shouldn’t know that I was deliberately responsible for their being sent here. What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over.”

“And what about that cave you were talking about when we were in the Mohave? I suppose you’ve got that all lined up too.”

“Of course. You probably haven’t seen it, but over there — just below that hillock — we’ve got a vast quantity of earth-moving machinery at work.”

“Who looks after it?”

“The chaps that live down on the new housing estate.”

“And who runs the house here, cooks the food, and so on?”

“The women from the new estate, and the girls do the secretarial work.”

“What happens to them when things get tough?”

“They come into the shelter, of course. It means that the shelter has to be far bigger than I originally intended. That’s why we’ve started work on it so early.”

“Well, Chris, it seems to me as if you’ve arranged a pretty smooth trip for yourself. But I don’t see where the politicians are getting their rough ride. After all they’ve got us boxed in here, and by what you told me a while ago they’re getting all the information you can give ’em. So things look pretty smooth for them too.”

“Let me put it to you as I saw it in January and February. In February I planned to take over the control of world affairs.”

Marlowe laughed.

“Oh, I know it sounds ridiculously melodramatic. But I’m being serious. And I’m not suffering from megalomania either. At least I don’t think I am. It was only to be for a month or two, after which I would retire gracefully back to scientific work. I’m not the stuff dictators are made of. I’m only really comfortable as an underdog. But this was a heaven-sent opportunity for the underdog to take a great big bite out of those who were hoofing him around.”

“Living in this mansion you certainly look pretty much the underdog,” said Marlowe, settling down to his pipe and still laughing.

“All this had to be fought for. Otherwise we’d have had the same sort of set-up that you objected to. Let me talk a bit of philosophy and sociology. Has it ever occurred to you, Geoff, that in spite of all the changes wrought by science — by our control over inanimate energy, that is to say — we will preserve the same old social order of precedence? Politicians at the top, then the military, and the real brains at the bottom. There’s no difference between this set-up and that of Ancient Rome, or of the first civilizations in Mesopotamia for that matter. We’re living in a society that contains a monstrous contradiction, modern in its technology but archaic in its social organization. For years the politicians have been squawking about the need for more trained scientists, more engineers, and so forth. What they don’t seem to realize is that there are only a limited number of fools.”

“Fools?”

“Yes, people like you and me, Geoff. We’re the fools. We do the thinking for an archaic crowd of nitwits and allow ourselves to be pushed around by ’em into the bargain.”

“Scientists of the world unite! Is that the idea?”

“Not exactly. It isn’t just a case of scientists versus the rest. The matter goes deeper. It’s a clash between two totally different modes of thinking. Society today is based in its technology on thinking in terms of numbers. In its social organization, on the other hand, it is based on thinking in terms of words. It’s here that the real clash lies, between the literary mind and the mathematical mind. You ought to meet the Home Secretary. You’d see straight away what I mean.”

“And you had an idea for altering all this?”

“I had an idea for striking a blow for the mathematical mind. But I’m not sufficient of an ass to imagine that anything I could do would be of decisive importance. With luck I thought I might be able to provide a good example, a sort of locus classicus , to quote the literary boys, for how we ought to set about twisting the tails of the politicians.”

“My God, Chris, you talk about numbers and words, but I never knew a man who used so many words. Can you explain what you’re up to in simple terms?”

“By that I suppose you mean in terms of numbers. Well, I’ll try. Let’s assume that survival is possible when the Cloud gets here. Although I say survival, it’s pretty certain that the conditions won’t be pleasant. We shall either be freezing or sweltering. It’s obviously extremely unlikely that people will be able to move about in a normal way. The most we can hope for is that by staying put, by digging our caves or cellars and staying in them, we shall be able to hang on. In other words all normal travel of people from place to place will cease. So communication and the control of human affairs must come to depend on electrical information. The signalling will have to go by radio.”

“You mean that coherence in society — coherence so that we don’t split up into a whole lot of disconnected individuals — will depend on radio communications?”

“That’s right. There’ll be no newspapers, because the newspaper staffs will be in shelter.”

“Is this where you come in, Chris? Is Nortonstowe going to become a pirate radio station? Oh boy, where are my false whiskers!”

“Now listen. When radio communication becomes of overriding importance, problems of quantity of information will become vital. Control will gradually pass to those people with the ability to handle the greatest volume of information, and I planned that Nortonstowe would be able to handle at least a hundred times as much as all other transmitters on the Earth put together.”

“This is fantasy, Chris! How about power supplies for one thing?”

“We’ve got our own diesel generators, and plenty of fuel.”

“But surely you can’t generate the tremendous amount of power that would be needed?”

“We don’t need a tremendous amount of power. I didn’t say we would have a hundred times the power of all other transmitters put together. I said we would have a hundred times the information-carrying capacity, which is quite a different thing. We shan’t be transmitting programmes to individual people. We shall be transmitting on quite low power to Governments all over the world. We shall become a sort of international information clearing-house. Governments will pass messages one to another through us. In short we shall become the nerve centre of world communication, and that is the sense in which we shall control world affairs. If that seems a bit of an anti-climax after my build-up, well, remember I’m not a melodramatic sort of person.”

“I’m coming to realize that. But how on earth do you propose to equip yourself with this information-carrying capacity?”

“Let me give you the theory of it first. It’s quite well known really. The reason it hasn’t been put into operation already is partly inertia, vested interest in existing equipment, and partly inconvenience — all messages have to be recorded before transmission.”