Rebel in Time

'Please, Troy, don't make this billion dollar hunk of highly complicated apparatus sound like an office copying machine that counts the number of copies made. It doesn't work that way. It's all new, all experimental.'

'I know. But there still might be records kept of something. Does it use things up, you know, like welding rods or carbon sticks in an arc lamp?'

Kleiman drew back and pressed his hand to his chest. 'My God,' he gasped. 'You live in the mechanical dark ages. Haven't you heard of the new physics? Even in Korea they get rich now knowing about that. Haven't you ever read about solid state circuitry or very large integrated circuits? We don't use radio tubes or filaments — not to mention your welding rods and carbon sticks — nor switches nor relays or anything like that any more. It's all solid state now, one big lump. The only things that move are the electrons and you can't see them. The only consumable — other than paper for the printer — is electricity.'

'Well, electricity then. Is there a meter? Any record kept of how much you use?'

'No way. I suppose we get a bill every month or something like that which someone in the office pays. Not my department. I know that we use a hell of a lot of it. So much so that about a year back we were popping breakers in the substation and they had to run in a new line…'

Kleiman stopped suddenly and stared into space. Then he blinked and shook his head, turning slowly to face Troy.

'Do you know what you are?' he said. 'You are a genius. The Sherlock Holmes of Foggy Bottom. You act like a nebbish about science — when all of the time you are leading me by the hand to the answer. I'm the one who is the yold. Without your kick up the ass I never would have remembered.'

'Remembered what?'

'Remembered about the time when the electric company got all excited, and we got excited too because we were losing experiments that crashed when the current pooped out. That was when we started to monitor the line to find out how much juice we were using, keep a record so they could guarantee a sufficient supply for us at all times.'

Troy felt he was close to an answer now, very close. 'What kind of monitor?'

'It wasn't really a monitor. They tried to bring in one of their ususal recorders, but you should have seen the monster. Clanking and sputtering while it drew a graph on a rotating drum. No one wanted the big dirty thing leaking red ink all over the place. It really was Stone-Age technology. I remember, they tried to set it up, but we tossed them out. All of the functions of the equipment here are controlled and monitored by our mainframe computer. It has I don't know how many K of random access memory on hard disk, plus a real-time clock and all the extra goodies anyone might possibly want. So one of the software people wrote a program to monitor the electricity being used, and after that everyone was happy. We had the records we needed and life was beautiful.'

Troy was puzzled. 'But wouldn't this computer meter be disconnected after it was no longer needed?'

Kleiman shook his head. 'You got it wrong. We didn't add any meters or junk. We just wrote a program, instructions for the computer, to remember some facts for us. All of which operated invisibly and unseen until someone asked the thing to tell us what had gone on. We even added some inputs of our own to help us in recording experiments. Very handy it was in the early days.'

'But you no longer use it?'

'We no longer access the information. You've got to learn the jargon if you are going to be hanging around here. Once a program is started it will keep running forever unless you stop it.' He waved his hand at a row of steel cabinets. 'It's all in there. All you have to do is ask.'

Troy gazed in wonder at the featureless doors. 'Are you serious? Can we really find the record of all the experiments?'

'Every one. Just ask the right question.'

'Then ask!'

'Not me,' Kleiman said, reaching for the telephone. 'This is the age of the specialist, young man. I'm a physicist, not a flow-chart doodler. For this you need the right person. Nina Vassella, our head programmer. She'll know what to do… Hello, Nina? Come 'sta? Bene? That's what I like to hear. Look, we got a little problem down in nine that only you can solve. When? Now, of course. Be a sweety-pie. That's my girl. Thanks.' He hung up. 'She'll be right down.'

Nina was dark, petite, lovely — and she knew her business.

'Of course I remember the program,' she said. 'Particularly since I wrote it.'

'Is it still running?'

'Undoubtedly. Since it would probably crash the entire system if one of you ham-handed masters of cosmic theory tried to get anywhere near it. And I haven't wiped it. So it must still be ticking away. Let's see.'