NO.
TYPE LONGEST DISTANCE IN FURLONGS OVER WHICH HORSE HAS WON.
12
HAS HORSE RUN ON COURSE? NO.
TYPE IN PRIZE MONEY WON IN CURRENT SEASON.
I consulted the form books and typed Genotti's winnings, which had been fairly good but not stupendous.
HAS HORSE'S SIRE SIRED WINNERS AT THE DISTANCE?
I looked it up in the breeding records, which took much longer, but the answer was YES.
DAM ditto? YES.
IS HORSE QUOTED ANTE-POST AT TWELVE TO ONE OR LESS?
YES.
HAS JOCKEY PREVIOUSLY WON A CLASSIC?
YES.
HAS TRAINER PREVIOUSLY WON A CLASSIC?
YES.
ANY MORE HORSES?
YES.
I found myself back at the beginning and repeated the program for every horse which had run in the race. The questions weren't always precisely the same, because different answers produced alternative queries, and for some horses there were far more questions than for Others. It took me a good hour to look everything up, and I thought that if I ever did begin to do it all seriously I would make myself a whole host of more easily accessible tables than those available in the record books. When I at last answered NO to the final question ANY MORE HORSES? I got the clear reply that left no doubt about Liam O'Rorke's genius.
Genotti headed the win factor list. An outsider turned up on it in second place, with the horse that had started favourite in third: and the St Leger result had been those three horses in that order exactly. I could hardly believe it.
Ruth Quigley said suddenly, 'Got the wrong result? You look flummoxed.'
'No – the right one.'
'Disturbing.' She grinned swiftly. 'If I get the results I expect, I check and check and check. Doesn't do to be complacent. Like some coffee?'
I accepted and she made it as fast as she did everything else.
'How old are you?' I said.
'Twenty-one. Why?'
'I'd have thought you'd have been at the university.'
'Degree at twenty plus one month. Nothing unusual. Cheated my way in, of course. Everything's so slow nowadays. Forty years ago, degrees at nineteen or less were possible. Now they insist on calendar age. Why? Why hold people back? Life's terribly short as it is. Masters degree at twenty plus six months. Did the two courses simultaneously. No one knew. Don't spread it around. Doing my doctorate now. Are you interested?'
'Yes,' I said truthfully.
She smiled like a summer's day, come and gone. 'My father says I'm a bore.'
'He doesn't mean it.'
'He's a surgeon,' she said, as if that explained much. 'So's my mother. Guilt complexes, both of them. Give to mankind more than you take. That sort of thing. They can't help it.'
'And you?'
'I don't know yet. I can't give much. I can't get jobs I can do. They look at the years I've been alive and make judgments. Quite deadly. Time has practically nothing to do with anything. They'll give me the jobs when I'm thirty that I could do better now. Poets and mathemeticians are best before twenty-five. What chance have they got?'
'To work alone,' I said.
'My God. Do you understand? You're wasting time, get on with your programs. Don't show me what I should do. I've got a research fellowship. What do I seek for? What is there to seek? Where is the unknown, what is not known, what's the question?'
I shook my head helplessly, 'Wait for the apple to fall on your head.'
'It's true. I can't contemplate. Sitting under the apple trees. Metaphorical apple trees. I've tried. Get on with your nags.'
Philosophically I loaded YORK and worked through the three races for which there were programs, and found that in two of them the highest-scoring horse had won. Three winners from the four races I'd worked through. Incredible.
With a feeling of unreality I loaded EPSOM and went painstakingly through the four races for which there were programs; and this time came up with no winners at all. Frowning slightly I loaded NEWBU for Newbury and from a good deal of hard accurate work came up with the win factors of the race in which Angelo had backed the absolute no-hoper Pocket Handbook.
Pocket Handbook, who had finished exhausted and tailed-off by at least thirty lengths, was at the top of the win-factor list by a clear margin.
I stared distrustfully at the rest of the scores, which put the race's actual winner second from the bottom with negligible points.
'What's the matter?' Ruth Quigley said, busy at her own machine and not even glancing my way.
'Parts of the system are haywire.'
'Really?'
I loaded GOODW and sorted through five races. All the top scorers were horses which in the events had finished no nearer than second.
'Are you hungry?' Ruth said. 'Three-thirty. Sandwich?'
I thanked her and went with her into her small kitchen where I was interested to see that her speed stopped short of dexterity with slicing tomatoes. She quite slowly, for her, made fat juicy affairs of cheese, chutney, tomatoes and corned beef which toppled precariously on the plate and had to be held in both hands for eating.
'Logical explanations exist,' she said, looking at my abstracted expression. 'Human logic's imperfect. Absolute logic isn't.'
'Mm,' I said. 'Ted showed me how easy it is to add and delete passwords.'
'So?'
'It would be pretty easy, wouldn't it, to change other things besides?'
'Unless it's in ROM. Then it's difficult.'
'ROM?'
'Read only Memory. Sorry.'
'He showed me how to List things.'
'You've got RAM, then. Random Access Memory. Change what you like. Kids' stuff.'
We finished the sandwiches and returned to the keyboards. I loaded the Newbury file, chose the Pocket Handbook race and listed the program piece by piece.
LIST 1200-1240 I typed, and in front of the resulting screenful of letters, numbers and symbols sat figuring out the roots of trouble.
1200 PRINT 'TYPE IN PRIZE MONEY IN CURRENT SEASON'
1210 INPUT W: IF W
1220 IF W› 1000 THEN T=T: IF W› 5000 T=T
1230 IF W › 10000 THEN T=T: IF W › 15000 THEN T=T
1240 GOSUB
Even to my ignorant and untutored eyes it was nonsense. Liam O'Rorke wouldn't have meant it, Peter Keithly wouldn't have written it, Ted Pitts would never have used it. In plain language, what it was saying was that if the season's winnings of a horse were less than one thousand pounds, the win factor score should be increased by 20,
