The Ghost from the Grand Banks Read online

  The car seemed to be sliding between the rain-washed walls of a glass canyon. Emerson had driven this way a hundred times before, but only now did the blindingly obvious hit him with paralyzing force.

  Then he recovered his breath, and said to the carcom: “Get me Joe Wickram.”

  His lawyer, sunning himself on a yacht off the Great Barrier Reef, was a little surprised by the call.

  “This is going to cost you, Roy. I was just about to gaff a marlin.”

  Emerson was in no mood for such trivialities.

  “Tell me, Joe—does the patent cover all applications—not just car windshields?”

  Joe was hurt at the implied criticism.

  “Of course. That’s why I put in the clause about adaptive circuits, so it could automatically adjust to any shape and size. Thinking of a new line in sunglasses?”

  “Why not? But I’ve got something slightly bigger in mind. Remember that the Wave Wiper doesn’t merely keep off water—it shakes off any dirt that’s already there. Do you remember when you last saw a car with a really dirty windshield?”

  “Not now you mention it.”

  “Thanks. That’s all I wanted to know. Good luck with the fishing.”

  Roy Emerson leaned back in his seat and did some mental calculation. He wondered if all the windshields of all the cars in the city of New York could match the area of glass in the single building he was now driving past.

  He was about to destroy an entire profession; armies of window cleaners would soon be looking for other jobs.

  Until now, Roy Emerson had been merely a millionaire. Soon he would be rich.

  And bored…

  4. THE CENTURY SYNDROME

  When the clocks struck midnight on Friday, 31 December 1999, there could have been few educated people who did not realize that the twenty-first century would not begin for another year. For weeks, all the media had been explaining that because the Western calendar started with Year 1, not Year 0, the twentieth century still had twelve months to go.

  It made no difference; the psychological effect of those three zeros was too powerful, the fin de siècle ambience too overwhelming. This was the weekend that counted; 1 January 2001 would be an anticlimax, except to a few movie buffs.

  There was also a very practical reason why 1 January 2000 was the date that really mattered, and it was a reason that would never have occurred to anyone a mere forty years earlier. Since the 1960s, more and more of the world’s accounting had been taken over by computers, and the process was now essentially complete. Millions of optical and electronic memories held in their stores trillions of transactions—virtually all the business of the planet.

  And, of course, most of these entries bore a date. As the last decade of the century opened, something like a shock wave passed through the financial world. It was suddenly, and belatedly, realized that most of those dates lacked a vital component.

  The human bank clerks and accountants who did what was still called “bookkeeping” had very seldom bothered to write in the “19” before the two digits they had entered. These were taken for granted; it was a matter of common sense. And common sense, unfortunately, was what computers so conspicuously lacked. Come the first dawn of ’00, myriads of electronic morons would say to themselves ’00 is smaller than 99. Therefore today is earlier than yesterday—by exactly 99 years. Recalculate all mortgages, overdrafts, interest-bearing accounts on this basis…” The results would be international chaos on a scale never witnessed before; it would eclipse all earlier achievements of artificial stupidity—even Black Monday, 5 June 1995, when a faulty chip in Zurich had set the bank rate at 150 percent instead of 15 percent.

  There were not enough programmers in the world to check all the billions of financial statements that existed, and to add the magic “19” prefix wherever necessary. The only solution was to design special software that could perform the task, by being injected—like a benign virus—into all the programs involved.

  During the closing years of the century, most of the world’s star-class programmers were engaged in the race to develop a “Vaccine ’99”; it had become a kind of Holy Grail. Several faulty versions were issued as early as 1997—and wiped out any purchasers who hastened to test them before making adequate backups. The lawyers did very well out of the ensuing suits and countersuits.

  Edith Craig belonged to the small pantheon of famous women programmers that began with Byron’s tragic daughter Ada, Lady Lovelace, continued through Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, and culminated with Dr. Susan Calvin. With the help of only a dozen assistants and one SuperCray, she had designed the quarter million lines of code of the DOUBLEZERO program that would prepare any well-organized financial system to face the twenty-first century. It could even deal with badly organized ones, inserting the computer equivalent of red flags at danger points where human intervention might still be necessary.

  It was just as well that 1 January 2000 was a Saturday; most of the world had a full weekend to recover from its hangover—and to prepare for the moment of truth on Monday morning.

  The following week saw a record number of bankruptcies among firms whose accounts receivable had been turned into instant garbage. Those who had been wise enough to invest in DOUBLEZERO survived, and Edith Craig was rich, famous… and happy.

  Only the wealth and the fame would last.

  5. EMPIRE OF GLASS

  Roy Emerson had never expected to be rich, so he was not adequately prepared for the ordeal. At first he had naively imagined that he could hire experts to look after his rapidly accumulating wealth, leaving him to do exactly what he pleased with his time. He had soon discovered that this was only partly true: money could provide freedom, but it also brought responsibility. There were countless decisions that he alone could make, and a depressing number of hours had to be spent with lawyers and accountants.

  Halfway to his first billion, he found himself chairman of the board. The company had only five directors—his mother, his older brother, his younger sister, Joe Wickram, and himself.

  “Why not Diana?” he had asked Joe.

  Emerson’s attorney looked at him over the spectacles which, he fondly believed, gave him an air of distinction in this age of ten-minute corrective eye surgery.

  “Parents and siblings are forever,” he said. “Wives come and go—you should know that. Not, of course, that I’m suggesting…”

  Joe was right; Diana had indeed gone, like Gladys before her. It had been a fairly amicable, though expensive, departure, and when the last documents had been signed, Emerson disappeared into his workshop for several months. When he emerged (without any new inventions, because he had been too engrossed in discovering how to operate his wonderful new equipment to actually use it) Joe was waiting for him with a new surprise.

  “It won’t take much of your time,” he said, “and it’s a great honor: Parkinson’s are one of the most distinguished firms in England, established over two hundred years ago. And it’s the first time they’ve ever taken a director from outside the family—let alone a foreigner.”

  “Ha! I suppose they need more capital.”

  “Of course. But it’s to your mutual interest—and they really respect you. You know what you’ve done to the glass business, worldwide.”

  “Will I have to wear a top hat and—what do they call them—spats?”

  “Only if you want to be presented at court, which they could easily arrange.”

  To his considerable surprise, Roy Emerson had found the experience not only enjoyable, but stimulating. Until he joined the board of Parkinson’s and attended its bimonthly meetings in the City of London, he thought he knew something about glass. He very quickly discovered his mistake.

  Even ordinary plate glass, which he had taken for granted all his life—and which contributed to most of his fortune—had a history which astonished him. Emerson had never asked himself how it was made, assuming that it was squeezed out of the molten raw material between giant rollers.

>   So indeed it had been, until the middle of the twentieth century—and the resulting rough sheets had required hours of expensive polishing. Then a crazy Englishman had said: Why not let gravity and surface tension do all the work? Let the glass float on a river of molten metal: that will automatically give a perfectly smooth surface…

  After a few years, and a few million pounds, his colleagues suddenly stopped laughing. Overnight, “float glass” made all other methods of manufacturing obsolete.

  Emerson was much impressed by this piece of technological history, recognizing its parallel with his own breakthrough. And he was honest enough to admit that it had required far more courage and commitment than his own modest invention. It exemplified the difference between genius and talent.

  He was also fascinated by the ancient art of the glassblower, who had not been wholly replaced by technology and probably never would be. He even paid a visit to Venice, now cowering nervously behind its Dutch-built dikes, and goggled at the intricate marvels in the Glass Museum. Not only was it impossible to imagine how some of them had been manufactured, it was incredible that they had even been moved intact from their place of origin. There seemed no limit to the things that could be done with glass, and new uses were still being discovered after two thousand years.

  On one particularly dull board meeting Emerson had been frankly daydreaming, admiring the nearby dome of St. Paul’s from one of the few vantage points that had survived commercial greed and architectural vandalism. Two more items on the agenda and they’d be at Any Other Business; then they could all go to the excellent lunch that was waiting in the Penthouse Suite.

  The words “four hundred atmospheres pressure” made him look up. Sir Roger Parkinson was reading from a letter which he was holding as if it were some species of hitherto unknown insect. Emerson quickly riffled through the thick folder of his agenda and found his own copy.

  It was on impressive stationery, but the usual polynomial legal name meant nothing to him; he noted approvingly, however, that the address was in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. At the bottom of the sheet, like a modest cough, were the words “Est. 1803,” in letters barely visible to the naked eye.

  “They don’t give the name of their client,” said young (thirty-five if he was a day) George Parkinson. “Interesting.”

  “Whoever he is,” interjected William Parkinson-Smith—the family’s secretly admired black sheep, much beloved by the gossip channels for his frequent domestic upheavals—’he doesn’t seem to know what he wants. Why should he ask for quotes on such a range of sizes? From a millimeter, for heaven’s sake, up to a half-meter radius.”

  “The larger size,” said Rupert Parkinson, famous racing yachtsman, “reminds me of those Japanese fishing floats that get washed up all over the Pacific. Make splendid ornaments.”

  “I can think of only one use for the smallest size,” said George portentously. “Fusion power.”

  “Nonsense, Uncle,” interjected Gloria Windsor-Parkinson (100 Meters Silver, 2004 Olympics). “Laser-zapping was given up years ago—and the microspheres for that were tiny. Even a millimeter would be far too big—unless you wanted a housebroken H-bomb.”

  “Besides, look at the quantities required,” said Arnold Parkinson (world authority on Pre-Raphaelite art). “Enough to fill the Albert Hall.”

  “Wasn’t that the title of a Beatles song?” asked William. There was a thoughtful silence, then a quick scrabbling at keyboards. Gloria, as usual, got there first.

  “Nice try, Uncle Bill. It’s from Sergeant Pepper—‘A Day in the Life.” I had no idea you were fond of classical music.”

  Sir Roger let the free-association process go its way unchecked. He could bring the board to an instant full stop by lifting an eyebrow, but we was too wise to do so—yet. He knew how often these brainstorming sessions led to vital conclusions—even decisions—that mere logic would never have discovered. And even when they fizzled out, they helped the members of his worldwide family to know each other better.

  But it was Roy Emerson (token Yank) who was to amaze the massed Parkinsons with his inspired guess. For the last few minutes, an idea had been forming in the back of his mind. Rupert’s reference to the Japanese fishing floats had provided the first vague hint, but it would never have come to anything without one of those extraordinary coincidences that no self-respecting novelist would allow in a work of fiction.

  Emerson was sitting almost facing the portrait of Basil Parkinson, 1874–1912. And everyone knew where he had died, though the exact circumstances were still the stuff of legend—and at least one libel action.

  There were some who said that he had tried to disguise himself as a woman, so that he could get into one of the last boats to leave. Others had seen him in animated conversation with Chief Designer Andrews, completely ignoring the icy water rising around his ankles. This version was considered—at least by the family—to be far more probable. The two brilliant engineers would have enjoyed each other’s company, during the last minutes of their lives.

  Emerson cleared his throat, a little nervously. He might be making a fool of himself…

  “Sir Roger,” he said. “I’ve just had a crazy idea. You’ve all seen the publicity and speculations about the centennial, now that it’s only five years to 2012. A few million bubbles of toughened glass would be just right for the job everyone’s talking about.

  “I think our mystery customer is after the Titanic.”

  6. “A NIGHT TO REMEMBER”

  Although most of the human race had seen his handiwork, Donald Craig would never be as famous as his wife. Yet his programming skills had made him equally rich, and their meeting was inevitable, for they had both used supercomputers to solve a problem unique to the last decade of the twentieth century.

  In the mid-90s, the movie and TV studios had suddenly realized that they were facing a crisis that no one had ever anticipated, although it should have been obvious years in advance. Many of the classics of the cinema—the capital assets of the enormous entertainment industry—were becoming worthless, because fewer and fewer people could bear to watch them. Millions of viewers would switch off in disgust at a western, a James Bond thriller, a Neil Simon comedy, a courtroom drama, for a reason which would have been inconceivable only a generation before. They showed people smoking.

  The AIDS epidemic of the ’90s had been partly responsible for this revolution in human behavior. The twentieth century’s Second Plague was appalling enough, but it killed only a few percent of those who died, equally horribly, from the innumerable diseases triggered by tobacco. Donald’s father had been among them, and there was poetic justice in the fact that his son had made several fortunes by “sanitizing” classic movies so that they could be presented to the new public.

  Though some were so wreathed in smoke that they were beyond redemption, in a surprising number of cases skillful computer processing could remove offending cylinders from actors” hands or mouths, and banish ashtrays from tabletops. The techniques that had seamlessly welded real and imaginary worlds in such landmark movies as Who Framed Roger Rabbit had countless other applications—not all of them legal. However, unlike the video blackmailers, Donald Craig could claim to be performing a useful social function.

  He had met Edith at a screening of his sanitized Casablanca, and she had at once pointed out how it could have been improved. Although the trade joked that he had married Edith for her algorithms, the match had been a success on both the personal and professional levels. For the first few years, at least…

  “…This will be a very simple job,” said Edith Craig when the last credits rolled off the monitor. “There are only four scenes in the whole movie that present problems. And what a joy to work in good old black and white!”

  Donald was still silent. The film had shaken him more than he cared to admit, and his cheeks were still moist with tears. What is it, he asked himself, that moves me so much? The fact that this really happened, and that the names of all the hundreds of
people he had seen die—even if in a studio reenactment—were still on record? No, it had to be something more than that, because he was not the sort of man who cried easily…

  Edith hadn’t noticed. She had called up the first logged sequence on the monitor screen, and was looking thoughtfully at the frozen image.

  “Starting with Frame 3751,” she said. “Here we go—man lighting cigar—man on right screen ditto—end on Frame 4432—whole sequence forty-five seconds—what’s the client’s policy on cigars?”

  “Okay in case of historical necessity; remember the Churchill retrospective? No way we could pretend he didn’t smoke.”

  Edith gave that short laugh, rather like a bark, that Donald now found more and more annoying.

  “I’ve never been able to imagine Winston without a cigar—and I must say he seemed to thrive on them. After all, he lived to ninety.”

  “He was lucky; look at poor Freud—years of agony before he asked his doctor to kill him. And toward the end, the wound stank so much that even his dog wouldn’t go near him.”

  “Then you don’t think a group of 1912 millionaires qualifies under ‘historical necessity’?”

  “Not unless it affects the story line—and it doesn’t. So I vote clean it up.”

  “Very well—Algorithm Six will do it, with a few subroutines.”

  Edith’s fingers danced briefly over the keyboard as she entered the command. She had learned never to challenge her partner’s decisions in these matters; he was still too emotionally involved, though it was now almost twenty years since he had watched his father struggling for one more breath.

  “Frame 6093,” said Edith. “Cardsharp fleecing his wealthy victims. Some on the left have cigars, but I don’t think many people would notice.”

  “Agreed,” Donald answered, somewhat reluctantly. “If we can cut out that cloud of smoke on the right. Try one pass with the haze algorithm.”