Fred Hoyle - The Black Cloud

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At about three-thirty he went out of College, thoroughly muffled up and sheltering under his umbrella a voluminous sheaf of papers. He worked his way by the shortest route to Corn Exchange Street, and so into the building where the computing machine was housed, the machine that could do five years of calculation in one night. The building had once been the old Anatomy School and was rumoured by some to be haunted, but this was far from his mind as he turned from the narrow street into the side door.

His first move was not to the machine itself, which in any case was being operated by others just at that moment. He still had to convert the letters and figures he had written into a form that the machine could interpret. This he did with a special kind of typewriter, a typewriter that delivered a strip of paper in which holes were punched, the pattern of the holes corresponding to the symbols that were being typed. It was the holes in the paper that constituted the final instructions to the computer. Not one single hole among many thousands must be out of its proper place, otherwise the machine would compute incorrectly. The typing had to be done with meticulous accuracy, with literally one hundred per cent accuracy.

It was not until nearly six o’clock that Kingsley was satisfied that everything was satisfactorily in order, checked and double-checked. He made his way to the top floor of the building where the machine was housed. The heat of many thousands of valves made the machine-room pleasantly warm and dry on this cold damp January day. There was the familiar hum of electric motors and the rattle of the teleprinter.

The Astronomer Royal had spent a pleasant day visiting old friends, and a delightful evening at the Trinity Feast. Now at about midnight he felt much more like sleeping than sitting up at the Mathematical Laboratory. Still, perhaps he’d better go along and see what the crazy fellow was up to. A friend offered to take him by car to the lab., so there he was standing in the rain, waiting for the door to be opened. At length Kingsley appeared.

“Oh hello, A.R.,” he said. “You’ve come at just the right moment.”

They walked up several flights of stairs to the computer.

“Have you got some results already?”

“No, but I think I’ve got everything working now. There were several mistakes in the routines I wrote this morning and I’ve spent the last few hours in tracking ’em down. I hope I’ve got them all. I think so. Provided nothing goes wrong with the machine, we should get some decent results in an hour or two. Good feast?”

It was about two o’clock in the morning when Kingsley said:

“Well, we’re nearly there. We should have some results in a minute or two.”

Sure enough five minutes later there was a new sound in the room, the chatter of the high-speed punch. Out of the punch came a thin strip of paper about ten yards long. The holes in the paper gave the results of a calculation that it would have taken an unaided human a year to perform.

“Let’s have a look at it,” said Kingsley as he fed the paper tape into the teleprinter. Both men watched as row after row of figures were typed out.

“The lay-out isn’t very good, I’m afraid. Perhaps I’d better interpret. The first three rows give the values of the set of parameters I put into the calculations to take account of your observations.”

“And how about the position of the intruder?’ asked the Astronomer Royal.

“Its position and mass are given in the next four rows. But they’re not in a very convenient form — I said the lay-out isn’t very good. I want to use these results to calculate next what influence the intruder should have on Jupiter. This tape is in the right form for that.”

Kingsley indicated the paper strip that had just come out of the machine.

“But I shall have to do a little calculation myself before I can reduce the tabulated numbers to a really convenient form. Before I do that, let’s start the machine finding out about Jupiter.”

Kingsley pressed a number of switches. Then he put a large roll of paper tape into the ‘reader’ of the machine. After pressing another switch the reader began to unroll the tape.

“You see what happens,” said Kingsley. “As the tape is unrolled a light shines through the holes in it. The light then goes into this box here, where it falls on a photo-sensitive tube. This causes a series of pulses to go into the machine. This tape I’m just putting in gives instructions to the machine as to how it is to calculate the disturbance in the position of Jupiter, but the machine hasn’t had all its instructions yet. It still doesn’t know where the intruder is, or how massive it is, or how fast it’s moving. So the machine won’t start working yet.”

Kingsley was right. The machine stopped as soon as it had reached the end of the long roll of paper tape. Kingsley pointed to a small red light.

“This shows that the machine has stopped because the instructions aren’t complete yet. Now where’s that piece of tape we got out last time? That’s it on the table by you.”

The Astronomer Royal handed over the long strip of paper.

“And this supplies the missing piece of information. When this has gone in, the machine will know all about the intruder as well.”

Kingsley pressed a switch and in went the second piece of tape. As soon as it had run through the reader, just as the first tape had done before it, lights began to flash on a series of cathode-ray tubes.

“Off she goes. From now on for the next hour the machine will be multiplying a hundred thousand ten-figure numbers every minute. And while it does that, let’s make some coffee. I’m peckish, I haven’t had anything to eat since four o’clock yesterday afternoon.”

So the two men worked on through the night. It was greying dawn on a miserable January morning when Kingsley said:

“Well, that’s about it. We’ve got all the results here, but they need a bit of conversion before we can get to work on a comparison with your observations. I’ll get one of the girls to do that today. Look, A.R., I suggest you have dinner with me tonight, and then we’ll go over things with a tooth comb. Perhaps you’d like to slip along now and get a bit of sleep. I’ll stay on until the lab staff comes in.”

After dinner that night, the Astronomer Royal and Kingsley were again together in the latter’s rooms at Erasmus College. The dinner had been a particularly good one and they were both much at their ease as they drew up to the blazing fire.

“Lot of nonsense we hear nowadays about these closed stoves,” said the Astronomer Royal, nodding towards the fire. “They’re supposed to be very scientific, but there’s nothing scientific about ’em. The best form of heat is in the form of radiation from an open fire. Closed stoves only produce a lot of hot air that’s extremely unpleasant to breathe. They stifle you without warming you.”

“A lot of sense in that,” added Kingsley. “Never had any use for such devices myself. Now how about a spot of port before we get down to business? Or madeira, claret, or burgundy?”

“Very nice, I think I’d like the burgundy, please.”

“Good, I’ve got a quite nice Pommard ’57.”

Kingsley poured out two largish glasses, returned to his seat, and went on:

“Well, it’s all here. I’ve got my calculated values for Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. The agreement with your observations is fantastically good. I’ve made up a sort of synopsis of the main results here on these four sheets, one for each planet. You can see for yourself.”