53. Bestride This Narrow Earth

They prioritized finishing the two-tape monster over any new vacuum tube thing, which drove Mateo crazy. He knew that was probably the smart move, which drove him even crazier. My kingdom for a freakin’ Atari! A Gameboy! An old transistor radio! The stupid twelve-wheel code kept trucking along all mysterious, and creeps talked to creeps no problem like Station X wasn’t even there. It was enough to drive you up the wall. His world turned to eat, sleep, bum around outside on his breaks so he didn’t totally lose it, and beta-test synchronized tape rolls which wouldn’t synchronize unless you ran the whole thing so slow it was pointless. There were a bunch of eighteen-year-old kids whose whole job was gluing the tapes back together.

Nigel was so stressed out he just kind of lived inside a cloud of smoke. Nia didn’t speak much Welsh, but she knew enough to call the sprocket wheels things in it. She also called the whole mess Heath Robinson, which caught on until that turned into its official name.

“Isn’t that a candy bar?” Mateo had asked once he figured it wasn’t just weird British swearing. He was holding tension on one of the tapes while Nia tinkered with the pulley system down in the guts of the thing around the back of what he kept mentally calling the server rack.

“What?” She sounded weird, probably holding a screwdriver between her teeth. “No, you know ... Heath Robinson.”

“No, I don’t.”

“The cartoonist —ow!”

“You ok?”

“I’m fine.” Another pause that was probably her licking a skimmed knuckle. “I think you lot have a fellow like him. Gold-something. Pull the tape tighter, I want to check something.”

Mateo pulled the tape tighter. “That good?”

“A bit more ... all right, hold it there.”

Metal noises.

“...Rube Goldberg.”

“Mm?”

“The American version of Heath Robinson, I guess. Rube Goldberg.”

“That sounds right. Pass me the pliers, will you? Keep the tension on, though.”

“10-4.”

They finally got those stupid tape wheels to work, sort of, something about making one of the pulley wheels another driven wheel to take some of the tension off the sprocket. It was around summer that Mateo was pretty sure it cracked its first code. He was thrilled and freaked. What if he’d nudged things somehow so they ditched Colossus, whatever it turned out to be, and just went with Heath?

Heath was a real princess. He needed constant tweaking and repairs — every day, minimum. Also he was slow, holy cow he was slow. He maxed out at a lousy 2000 characters per second, which sounded like a lot until you tried to brute force old fashioned private keys with it. He’d mentioned P vs. NP to Nigel and he had no idea what he was talking about. No wonder — if the dang things were so slow, they probably didn’t even have the idea back now.

And good luck scaling Heath, keeping him running at all and syncing those freaking tapes was bad enough. And sometimes they’d be just barely off between runs and give you different answers.

And the tapes still broke on the reg and had to get glued back together. Without making rough spots or shortening the tapes. Some nights (or days) depending on the shift and how snippy Heath was being, Mateo would just sleep on the floor because he knew he’d be needed for some kind of grunt work.

But eventually the post office engineers got him.

“They didn’t turn up the first time when you were out?” Nia said, which was apparently a Hilarious Joke in the UK to judge by the Wrens’ reactions. He didn’t get it.

“Ahah, I uh ... yeah, technically, I was at lunch.”

That just killed them, for some reason.

Mateo was pretty sure Nigel had pulled a string, which was good. Scary. Good-scary. It meant he thought he could do weird cool future stuff on the build. He hoped he was right.

Next stop was H Block, then, where they were working on the Post Office vacuum tube ... thing. It wasn’t easy to get inside, which was fine with him.

When he did get inside, all he wanted to do was look for a minute. People were swarming around the thing, assembling and tinkering and attaching. It was shaping up into two tall racks, as high as he could reach, maybe twenty feet long, facing each other on the long side with an aisle in between. The familiar flipped-up bedstead with those friggin’ pulleys was catty-cornered to one end. At least you wouldn’t have to deal with two of them like on Heath. If this worked. Oh please let it work.

He took a step forward, looking at the racks. They were starting to fill up with banks of wires and switches and vacuum tubes — big things, the size of half an ear of corn. Some were clear, showing metal innards, and some were red, for some reason. Color-coding or some structural thing? He didn’t know.

It was funny. Even less than half built, the thing felt alive. Like it was watching him. He knew a graphing calculator had more processing power than this thing would have if it worked, but he still got a weird vibe of power from it. Not power to make people do things, like an army, but just power by itself, like the sun, or a black hole.

“Hey,” he said, quiet like he was in a cave or an old church. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, weirdly modern, making dead black shadows like spilled paint.

At least it was Nigel who stood up from under the rack to answer, not the computer.

“Hey yourself.” He came over, smoking like a chimney. He looked even more tired and rumpled and wired than usual. “Look at it! Just look at it.”

“It’s beautiful,” Mateo said, and meant it.

He wound up soldering under Flowers and Co’s eye, mostly. If there was some brilliant future thing he knew and they didn’t, he sure didn’t know what it was. Not on this machine, anyway.

It was coming along, though. Mateo, coming from construction, knew that even if it was an army project (or especially if it was an army project) any time estimates were usually the estimate plus a third. Flowers and his guys apparently didn’t know that, because here it was middle of summer and here they were on track.

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