The Turing Option

“Spartan but comfortable. The place was obviously designed for visiting salesmen and executives who manage to miss the last plane of the day. Fine for overnight — but a little grim by the second evening. Still, not too different from the first air force barracks I ever stayed in. I can stick it out for a few days at least.”

“Have they found you a better place to stay?”

“Megalobe Housing Advisors is on the job. They are taking me to see an apartment right down the road. Three this afternoon.”

“Good luck. How is Dick Tracy doing?”

“Keeping me busy. I had no idea before I started running this program that there were so many data bases in the country. I suppose it is Murphy’s Law of computers. The more memory you have the more you fill it up.”

“You’ll have quite a job filling up this mini-mainframe here.”

“I’m sure of that!”

He unlocked the lab door and held it so she could go by. “Will you have some time to work with me today?” he asked.

“Yes — if an hour from now is okay. I have to get permission to access some classified data bases that Dick Tracy wants to look at. Which will probably lead me to even more classified information.”

“Right.” He turned away and hadn’t gone a dozen steps before she called after him.

“Brian! Come see this.” She was studying the screen closely, touched a key and a copy emerged from the printer. She handed it to him. “Dick Tracy has been working all night. I found this displayed when I came in just now.”

“What is it?”

“A construction site in Guatay. Someone was building prefabricated luxury apartments there. Dick T. has pointed out the interesting fact that this construction is taking place almost directly under the flight path for the planes landing at the San Diego Airport in Miramar.”

“Am I being dumb? I don’t see the connection…”

“You will in a second. First off, with that much air traffic, people in the area tend to treat aircraft sounds as if they were some kind of constant background noise — like surf breaking on the beach. After a while you just don’t hear it. Secondly, because of the difficulty of getting to the building site — it’s very scenic but is halfway up a cliff — the prefab sections were brought in by freight copter. One of those monster TS-69s. They can lift twenty tons.”

“Or a loaded truck! Where’s your contour map?”

“The program has access to a complete set of satellite and geodetic survey topographic data bases.” She turned back to the terminal. “Dick Tracy — show me composite contour map and suspected route.”

The color graphics were clear and crisp and so realistic they might have been filmed from the air. The program displayed an animation of a vehicle traversing the route, as seen from above, complete with compass headings and altitude. The dotted trace stretched across the screen and ended with a flickering Maltese cross in a flat field next to Highway S3.

“Let’s have the radar view from Borrego Springs Airport.” Another beautiful graphic, as good as a photograph, but this time seen from the ground. “Now superimpose the landing site.”

The Maltese cross reappeared — apparently, deep inside the mountain.

“That is the suggested landing site. Anything further east would be detected by the Borrego Springs radar. This site is on the other side of the hills — in radar shadow. Now superimpose the flight path.” The dotted line stretched out across the screen.

“And all of the suggested flight path is behind the mountains and hills!” Shelly said triumphantly. “The chopper could have left the building site and flown to that field, could have been waiting there when the truck arrived — picked it up and flown back along the same track with it.”

“What about the radar at the airport here at Megalobe?”

The view of the mountains was slightly different on this display — but the computed track was the same; completely out of sight.

“The next and important question — how long would it take to drive from here to that pickup spot?”

“The program should be able to tell us — it has a data base of all the delivery vehicles in the area.”

She touched the graphic image of the vehicle with her finger and a display window appeared beneath it. “Sixteen to twenty minutes driving time from here, the variable being the speed of the truck. Let’s call it sixteen, then, because they would move as fast as they could without drawing attention.”

“This could be it! I must call Benicoff.”

“Done already. I had the computer get a call out with instructions to tell him that he is wanted here at once. Now let us find out how far the copter could have gone with the truck in those vital twenty minutes.”

“You are going to have to check all the radar units on the other side of the mountains that might cover that area.”