John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“Well,” Weintraub said. He was about to say, “That’s about it,” and get back to his work.

“Look,” Craine broke in, grabbing Weintraub’s elbow. “I know you’re busy, and I know it seems a waste of your valuable time, my asking all these questions, but we’re dealing with a murder and the possible involvement of a personal friend of mine — Ira Katz, I mean, a man I’m sure you have some feeling for yourself. Go along with me just a little longer. All I want is to get the feel of this place.”

“In half an hour?” Professor Weintraub asked mildly.

“I know, I know.” He thought of the whiskey in the truck — his chest full of pressure, something twisting in his stomach. He was so tense, so crowded by time and the befuddling complexity of things — he must meet Elaine Glass — how much time left, half an hour? — and he must get over to Carnac — if McClaren was right he should have gone there right off — and tense for more reasons than those, of course — McClaren’s suspicions, damn near had a case piled up, or so it seemed right now; Craine couldn’t be sure, couldn’t seem to think worth crap without that whiskey ’ He stood clinging to Weintraub’s elbow, bent forward as if ready to tighten to a crouch. “Just humor me! Believe me, I know what I’m doing! Where were we? Furth?” He began to move, pulling Weintraub along with him, half forcing him down the hallway as if he, Craine, had taken over as guide. “So why is it he hates computer poetry?”

Weintraub answered distantly, perhaps mainly out of pity. “Are you familiar with the term ‘effective procedures’—or ‘algorithms’?”

“I’m not sure,” Craine said. “It’s possible that somewhere—”

The professor held up his hand. “ ‘Effective procedures’ are what computer programs are built of,” he said. “An effective procedure is, so to speak, a set of rules that tells the player of a game, or a mathematician — or one of these computers — exactly what to do, that is, what the rules allow. Exactly. No fudging, no room for interpretation. A system as tyrannical as instinct to a bee. To put it another way, an effective procedure, an algorithm, is an inflexible, step-by-step way of doing something; for example, it may give the computer what we call a ‘routine’ for finding square roots. By its nature, an effective procedure assumes either the pure play of concepts, as in mathematics, or a determinist universe — you know, Leibnitz’ idea that if we could know where every particle of the universe is and exactly how it’s moving at any given time, we could predict the whole future of the universe.

“John Furth, as I’ve indicated, doesn’t like the idea of a determined universe. He’s a great believer in liberty, free will — all that. He’s also a great believer in computers, in their place; but he doesn’t want them writing poetry, or replacing the human judicial system, as many computer theorists are convinced they could and should. He doesn’t want them, as he puts it, ‘dehumanizing human beings’—which is to say, persuading us we ought to think lightly of intuition and emotion and be more like machines. Some people would say he exaggerates the danger — it has a suspiciously slogany sound: Dehumanization! But it’s an interesting subject.”

“I see, yes,” Craine said, eagerly agreeing. (He’d have agreed to anything to keep Weintraub talking.) “He must have been shocked, finding the dead woman in his car.”

Weintraub bent his head. “He was. I saw him just a few hours afterward. He was gray. Shaky. He looked like a man who’s lost a great amount of blood.”

“As extreme as that?”

“It was, believe me! I must say — I don’t mean to be unfeeling, you know — but I was rather surprised. I don’t think, if it were myself … But of course we all react differently to things …”

“If it were you, you were saying?”

Weintraub shook his head. “I don’t know. It might have been exactly the same, of course. None of us knows about these kinds of things, do we.”

“That’s true, of course,” Craine said. “No doubt a terrible shock.”

Craine, leading, had accidentally brought them to a large storage room — huge cardboard boxes and, under a high window, broken things: chairs, filing cabinets, wire-basket carts, high metal stands of some kind. “This is the storage and junk room,” Craine said, playing guide. He waved his pipe, authoritative.

Weintraub smiled, then started, with a nod to Craine, toward an alleyway through the cardboard boxes.

Craine asked, “Tell me, Professor, what’s it all do — the center, computer work? What’s the — what shall I say … What’s going on here, exactly?”

Again for just an instant Professor Weintraub smiled. “Briefly,” he said, “we create reality. Cup of coffee, Mr. Craine?” Economically, hardly more than a movement of one plump hand — he indicated a brown Mr. Coffee coffee maker, Styrofoam cups, cream and sugar, a group of plastic chairs. Beyond the chairs stood another double door, open, and beyond it another long hallway, offices on each side.

“Why yes, thank you,” Craine said, and got out his pipe. Though it had been riding in his pocket — he had no recollection of putting it there — it was still smoking. He puffed at it, getting it going.

Carefully, with gestures as expressionless as his face, Professor Weintraub filled two cups and, at Craine’s direction, added sugar and cream to one.

“I understand,” Craine said as they moved toward the double door, “Ira Katz has a fairly ambitious project going.”

“I imagine he does,” Professor Weintraub said. “I’m not personally familiar with it, but all the programs that come through here are ambitious.” He glanced absently into a room where a group of men with loosened ties sat arguing in clouds of cigarette smoke. “It’s all nonsense, really — or practically all nonsense.” His eyes moved left and right, halfheartedly checking the office doors as he and Craine passed with their coffee cups. Except for his legs, the rest of him, as he walked, seemed motionless, floating. “You’re in Bedlam, Mr. Craine.”

“I see,” Craine said, and waited.

Professor Weintraub stopped, solemnly raised his cup and drank, then lowered the cup and started walking again. He gestured toward a corridor breaking off to the right. “My office is down this way,” he said. As they moved toward it, he said, “What do we do here. Jesus, what a question!”

“Let me sketch in what I’m after,” Craine cut in. “I just want to know what kinds of problems come up, anything at all that will help me to get some idea of what it’s like to work here — for insiders, I mean. A programmer like April Vaught. The morale of the place, intrigues, disappointments …”

Professor Weintraub studied Craine thoughtfully with his slightly bugged gray eyes, then nodded, walking on. Before he’d figured out quite what to say, they’d reached his office. When they were seated, Weintraub at his desk, Craine opposite, Weintraub set his cup down, crossed his legs at the knees, and stared at the line where the wall met the ceiling. Framed in the window behind Weintraub’s head, Craine could see the chimneys of the chemistry building.

“I myself came into computers,” Weintraub said, “through mathematics. To me, computers are just large, fast calculators. They add, subtract, multiply, and so on; sort things very rapidly, by various criteria; and they remember things infallibly — in other words, they remember and manipulate formal symbols, figure out the values in a particular case of, say, F = ma or E = mc 2, to say nothing of equations considerably more complex.”