Stephen Fry - The Liar

'They?'

'Two years after graduation this first class mind is being paid eighty thousand pounds a year to devise advertising slogans for a proprietary brand of peanut butter or is writing snobbish articles in glossy magazines about exiled European monarchs and their children or some such catastrophic drivel. I see it year after year. Perhaps a chemist will arrive in the college. Great hopes are held out for his future. Nobel Prizes and who knows what else besides? He himself is full of the highest aspirations. Yet even before his final exams he has been locked and contracted into a job for life concocting synthetic pine-fresh biological soap powder fragrances for a detergent company. Adrian, someone is getting at our best minds! Someone is preventing them from achieving their full potential. This organisation I told you of is denying them a chance to grow and flourish. A university education should be broad and general. But these students are being trained, not educated. They are being stuffed like Strasbourg geese. Pappy mush is forced into them, just so one part of their brains can be fattened. Their whole minds are being ignored for the sake of that part of them which is marketable. Thus they have persuaded my godson Christopher to read Engineering instead of Mathematics.'

'How long has this been going on?'

'I cannot tell how long. Years, I suspect. I first began to take real notice fifteen or twenty years ago. But it is getting worse. More and more brilliant students are being diverted from work that could be of real benefit to mankind and their country. They are being battery farmed. Young Christopher Daly is just one of thousands.'

'My God!' said Adrian. 'You know who's behind this? We've got to stop them!'

'It's a conspiracy of industrialists, of certain highly placed economists and of members of governments of all political colours,' said Trefusis.

'But how can we prevent it? And what has it got to do with Salzburg?'

Trefusis looked across at Adrian, his eyes filled with grave concern. Suddenly he burst out laughing. Shaking his head from side to side, he snorted and struck the steering wheel. 'Oh Adrian, I am cruel! I'm wicked, naughty, dreadful and digraceful. Please forgive me.'

'What's so funny?'

'You silly, silly boy. What I have just described is the way the world works! It's not a conspiracy. It is called Modern Western Civilisation.'

'W-what do you mean?'

'Of course the best brains are lured into industry, advertising, journalism and the rest of it. Of course universities are adapting to the demands of commerce. It's regrettable and there's little we can do about it. But I think only a Marxist would call it an international conspiracy.'

'But you said an organisation . . . you told me that a specific organisation had offered that boy Christopher a scholarship.'

'The state, Adrian. A state scholarship. And the state will hope in return that he goes into something productive once he has obtained his degree. He will be incented by money, recruitment drives and the general thrust and tenor of the times. That is all.'

Adrian fumed in silence for a while.

'And this has nothing to do with what we're going to Salzburg for?'

'Nothing at all.'

'You are impossible, you know that?'

'Improbable perhaps, but not impossible. Besides, whilst what I described may not be a conscious intrigue, it is happening nonetheless and is vexatious in the extreme.'

'So you're still not going to tell me what we are in actual fact doing here?'

'All in actual good time,' said Trefusis. 'Now the Cardinal is getting thirsty; if memory has not fully quit her throne I believe there should be an amenable garage and routier in about eighty kilometres or so. In the meantime, we can tell each other the story of our lives.'

'All right,' said Adrian. 'You first. Tell me about Bletchley.'

'Little to tell. It was set up as a wartime decrypting station and filled up with mainly Cambridge personnel.'

'Why Cambridge?'

'The closest university town. At first they recruited philologists and linguists like myself.'

'This was when?'

'Nineteen-forty. Round about the time of the Battle of Britain.'

'And you were how old?'

'Tush and bibble! Is this then to be an interrogation? I was twenty-two.'

'Right. Just wondered.'

'Young and fizzing at the brim with ideals and theories about language. Now, who else was there with me? Dozens of girls who filed and clerked away with great brilliance and flair. The chess master Harry Golombek was on the team of course, and H.F.O. Alexander, also a magnificently dashing player. It was all rather cosy and fun at first, wrestling with enemy cyphers that had been intercepted all over Europe and Africa. It soon became clear, however, that the Enigma encryption device that German Naval Intelligence was using would need mathematicians to crack it. Acquaintanceship with the decryption techniques of the last war, the ability to do the Times crossword while shaving and a mastery of Russian verbs of motion were not enough any more. So they brought in Alan Turing, of whom you may have heard.'

Adrian had not.

'No? What a pity. Brilliant man. Quite brilliant, but very sad. Killed himself later. Many credit him with the invention of the digital computer. I can't quite remember how it came about. There was some pure mathematical problem which had faced the world of numbers for fifty years, I think, and he had solved it as a young man by positing the existence of a number-crunching machine. It was never his intention to build such a thing, it was merely hypothesised as a model to help solve an abstract difficulty. But unlike many mathematicians he relished the physical application of numbers. His hut in Bletchley was soon filled with rows and rows of valves. You remember valves? Tubes they call them in America. Little vacuum bulbs that glowed orange.'

'I remember,' said Adrian. 'It used to take television ages to warm up.'

'That's right. Well Alan had thousands of them all linked together in some impossibly complicated fashion. Got them from the Post Office.'

'The Post Office?'

'Yes, the GPO had been experimenting in electronics before the war and they seemed to be the only people who really knew about it. The clever thing about the Enigma machine was that, although it was purely mechanical, it changed daily and the number of permutations was so grotesquely huge that the old techniques of decryption wouldn't work. Alan cracked it quite brilliantly. But that was ony the first stage of course. He still needed to know the code before he could read the cypher.'

'What's the difference between a cypher and a code then?'

'Well, that is readily explained,' said Trefusis. 'Imagine a system in which a number refers to a letter of the alphabet. A equals one, B equals two, C equals three and so on, thus "Adrian" would be "One - four - eighteen - nine - one -fourteen", you understand?'

'Right...'

'That is a very basic form of cypher and a message written in it could be cracked by anyone of the meanest intelligence in seconds. But suppose that between us we two had personally prearranged that a word . . . "Biscuits", for example, was going to mean "nineteen-hundred hours", and that another word, for instance "Desmond", should signify "The Cafe Florian in St Mark's Square, Venice".'

'Got you . . .'

'I would then only have to signal to you: "Please send me some biscuits today, love Desmond," and you would know that I wanted to meet you at seven o'clock that evening at Florian's. That is a code and would be impossible to crack unless someone overheard us arranging it, or one of us was foolish enough to commit it to paper.'

'I see,' said Adrian. 'Then why not only use codes if they're uncrackable?'