To The Stars

The man hurried away. Jan shook his head in wonder. They had had this circuitry in his textbooks when he was in school; it must be fifty years old at least. There had been a dozen advances in the state of the art since its time. If there were more like this he could improve satellite construction easily enough by simply updating existing designs. Boring but easy. Which would give him enough free time for his personal project.

It was coming along well. He had already bypassed most of the seals on the Oxford University computer and was now searching for barred areas in the history sections. His years of computer circuit design were not being wasted.

Computers are completely unintelligent. Just big adding machines that count on their fingers. Except they have an incredible amount of fingers and can count awfully fast They cannot think for themselves or do anything that they have not been programmed to do. When a computer functions as a memory store it answers any questions asked of it. The memory banks of a public library are open to anyone with access to a terminal. A library computer is very helpful. It will find a book by title, by author’s name, or even by subject. It will supply information about a book or books until the customer is satisfied that this is indeed the book he really wants. Upon a signal the library computer will transmit the book — in a few seconds — to the memory bank of the questioning computer terminal. Simple.

But even a library computer has certain restrictions about releasing material. One is the age of the questioner and access to the pornography section. Every customer code contains the date of birth of the customer — as well as other relevant information — and if a boy age ten wants to read Fanny Hill he will find his request politely refused. And if he persists he will discover that the computer is programmed to inform his physician of this continuing unhealthy act.

However if the boy uses his father’s identification number the computer will supply Fanny Hill, in the color-illustrated edition, and no questions asked.

Jan knew just how unthinking computers really were, knew as well how to get around the blocks and warnings built into their programs. After less than a week’s work he had gained access to an unused terminal in Balliol College, had assigned it a new priority code, and was using it to gain access to the records he wanted to see. Even if his pryings did tip off alarms the request would only be traced back to Balliol, where things like this were expected to happen. If traced further still the circuit went through the pathology laboratory in Edinburgh before reaching his own terminal. He had installed enough alarms of his own in the program to let him know long before if he were being traced, to give him enough time to break the connection and remove all evidence of his tampering.

Today would be the major test to see if all this work had been worth the effort. He had prepared the program of requests at home and had it with him now. The morning tea break was on and most of the lab workers were away from their positions. Jan had diagrams displayed on four screens. And he was unobserved. He took out a small cigar — part of this ruse involved his taking up smoking again after a gap of almost eight years — then extracted the glow lighter from his pocket to light it with. The element went white hot in an instant and he puffed out a cloud of smoke. And put the lighter on the bench before him. Centered over the apparently accidental ink mark on the surface, that in reality had been very carefully positioned.

He cleared the small screen closest to him and asked it if it was ready to read information. It was — which meant the lighter was in the correct position over the wires in the bench. He hit the return key and the screen said ready. The program was now in the computer. The lighter went back into his pocket, along with the 64K magnetic bubble memory he had built inside it, in the space left when he had replaced the large battery with the smaller one.

The moment of truth. If he had written the program well it should extract the information he needed without leaving any trace of his request. Even if the alarms did go off he was sure they couldn’t track him easily. For as soon as the Edinburgh computer had the information it would transmit it to Balliol. Then, without waiting for verification of receipt, it would wipe all of its memories clean of the program, the request, the transmission, and the address. Balliol would do the same as soon as it had passed on the information to him in the lab. If the information were not transmitted correctly it would mean laboriously building up the sequence of circuits again. It would be worth the effort. No effort was too large if it prevented his being traced.