Richard Preston - Panic in Level 4

“Theoretically, the best way to cool a supercomputer is to submerge it in water,” Gregory said, from his bed in the junkyard.

“Then we could add goldfish,” David said.

“That would solve all our problems.”

“We are not good plumbers, Gregory. As long as I am alive, we will not cool a machine with water.”

“What is the temperature in there?” Gregory asked, nodding toward m zero’s room.

“It grows to above ninety Fahrenheit. This is not good. Things begin to fry.”

David took Gregory under the arm, and we passed through the French door into gloom and pestilential heat. The shades were drawn, the lights were off, and an air conditioner in a window ran in vain. Sweat immediately began to pour down my body. “I don’t like to go into this room,” Gregory said. The steel frame in the center of the room—the heart of m zero—seemed to have acquired more guts, and red lights blinked inside it. I could hear disk drives murmuring. The drives were copying and recopying huge segments of transcendental numbers, to check the digits for perfect accuracy. “If the machine makes an error in a single digit of pi, then every digit after that is nonsense. What comes out is not pi at all, it’s just some random number.” Thus they had to keep checking and rechecking the digits to make sure they were exactly pi to the last digit.

Gregory knelt on the floor, facing the steel frame.

David opened a cardboard box and removed an electronic board. He began to fit it into m zero. I noticed that his hands were marked with small cuts, which he had got from reaching into the machine.

“David, could you give me the flashlight?” Gregory asked.

David pulled the Mini Maglite from his shirt pocket and handed it to Gregory. The brothers knelt beside each other, Gregory shining the flashlight into the supercomputer. David reached inside with his fingers and palpated a logic board.

“Don’t!” Gregory said. “Okay, look. No! No!” They muttered to each other in Russian. “It’s too small,” Gregory said.

David adjusted an electric fan. “We bought it at a hardware store down the street,” he said to me. “We buy our fans in the winter. It saves money.” He pointed to a gauge that had a dial on it. “Here we have a meat thermometer.”

The brothers had thrust the meat thermometer between two circuit boards inside m zero, in order to look for hot spots. The thermometer’s dial was marked “Beef Rare—Ham—Beef Med—Pork.”

“You want to keep the machine below ‘Pork,’” Gregory remarked.

He lifted a keyboard out of a steel frame and typed something on it. Numbers filled a display screen. “The machine is checking its memory,” he said. A buzzer sounded. “It shut down!” he said. “It’s a disk-drive controller. The stupid thing obviously has problems.”

“It’s mentally deficient,” David commented. He went over to a bookshelf and picked up a hunting knife. I thought he was going to plunge it into the supercomputer, but he used it to rip open a cardboard box. “We’re going to ship the part back to the manufacturer,” he said to me. “You had better send it in the original box or you may not get your money back. Now you know the reason this apartment is full of empty boxes. Gregory, I wonder if you are tired.”

“If I stand up now, I will fall down,” Gregory said. “Therefore, I will sit in my center of gravity. Let me see, meanwhile, what is happening with this machine.” He typed something on his keyboard. “You won’t believe it, Dave, but the controller now seems to work.”

“We need to buy a new one anyway,” David said.

“Try Nevada.”

David dialed a computer-parts wholesaler in Nevada called Searchlight Compugear. He said loudly, in a Russian accent, “Hi, Searchlight. I need a fifteen-forty controller…. No! No! No! I don’t need anything else! Just a naked unit! How much you charge? What? Two hundred and fifty-seven dollars…?!”

Gregory glanced at his brother and shrugged. “Eh.”

“Look, Searchlight, can you ship it to me Federal Express? For tomorrow morning. How much? …Thirty-nine dollars for FedEx? Come on! What about afternoon delivery?… Twenty -nine dollars before three P.M.? Relax. What is your name?…Bob. Fine. Okay. So, Bob, it is two hundred and fifty-seven dollars plus twenty-nine dollars for FedEx?”

“Twenty-nine dollars for Fed Ex!” Gregory burst out. “It should be fifteen.” He pulled a second keyboard out of the frame and tapped the keys. Another display screen came alive and filled with numbers.

“Tell me this,” David said to Bob in Nevada. “Do you have a thirty-day money-back guarantee?…No? Come on! Look, any device might not work.”

“Of course, a part might work,” Gregory muttered to his brother. “But usually it doesn’t.”

“Question Number Two: The FedEx should not cost twenty-nine bucks,” David said to Bob. “No, nothing! I’m just asking.” David hung up the phone. “I’m going to A.K.,” he said. “Hi, A.K., this is David Chudnovsky calling from New York. A.K., I need another controller, like the one you sent. Can you send it today FedEx?…How much you charge?…Naked! I want a naked unit! Not in a shoe box, nothing!”

A rhythmic clicking sound came from one of the disk drives. Gregory remarked to me, “We are calculating pi right now.”

“Do you want my MasterCard? Look, it’s really imperative that I get my unit tomorrow. Please, I really need my unit bad.” David hung up the telephone and sighed. “This is what has happened to a pure mathematician.”

“GREGORY AND DAVID are both extremely childlike, but I don’t mean childish at all,” Gregory’s wife, Christine Pardo Chudnovsky, said one muggy summer day, at the dining room table. “There is a certain amount of play in everything they do, a certain amount of fooling around between two brothers.” She was six years younger than Gregory; she had been an undergraduate at Barnard College when she first met him. “I fell in love with Gregory immediately. His illness came with the package.” She remained in love with him, even if at times they fought over the heaps of paper. (“I don’t have room to put my things down anywhere,” she told him.) As we talked, though, pyramids of boxes and stacks of paper leaned against the dining room windows, pressing against the glass and blocking daylight, and a smell of hot electrical gear crept through the room. “This house is an example of mathematics in family life,” she said. At night, she dreamed that she was dancing from room to room through an empty apartment that had parquet floors.

David brought his mother out of her bedroom, settled her at the table, and kissed her on the cheek. Malka Benjaminovna seemed frail but alert. She was a small, white-haired woman with a fresh face and clear blue eyes who spoke limited English. A mathematician once described Malka Benjaminovna as the glue that held the Chudnovsky family together. She’d been an engineer during the Second World War, when she designed buildings, laboratories, and proving grounds for testing the Katyusha rocket. Later, she taught engineering at schools around Kiev. Smiling, she handed me plates of roast chicken, kasha, pickles, cream cheese, brown bread, and little wedges of Laughing Cow cheese in foil. “Mother thinks you aren’t getting enough to eat,” Christine said. Malka Benjaminovna slid a jug of Gatorade across the table at me.

After we finished lunch, and were fortified with Gatorade, the brothers and I went into the chamber of m zero, into a pool of thick heat. The room enveloped us like noon on the Amazon, and it teemed with hidden activity. The machine clicked, the red lights flashed, the air conditioner hummed, and you could hear dozens of whispering fans. Gregory leaned on his cane and stared into the machine. “Frankly, I don’t know what it’s doing right now. It’s doing some algebra, and I think it’s also backing up some pieces of pi.”