“I had an idea for striking a blow for the mathematical mind. But I’m not sufficient of an ass to imagine that anything I could do would be of decisive importance. With luck I thought I might be able to provide a good example, a sort of
“My God, Chris, you talk about numbers and words, but I never knew a man who used so many words. Can you explain what you’re up to in simple terms?”
“By that I suppose you mean in terms of numbers. Well, I’ll try. Let’s assume that survival is possible when the Cloud gets here. Although I say survival, it’s pretty certain that the conditions won’t be pleasant. We shall either be freezing or sweltering. It’s obviously extremely unlikely that people will be able to move about in a normal way. The most we can hope for is that by staying put, by digging our caves or cellars and staying in them, we shall be able to hang on. In other words all normal travel of people from place to place will cease. So communication and the control of human affairs must come to depend on electrical information. The signalling will have to go by radio.”
“You mean that coherence in society — coherence so that we don’t split up into a whole lot of disconnected individuals — will depend on radio communications?”
“That’s right. There’ll be no newspapers, because the newspaper staffs will be in shelter.”
“Is this where you come in, Chris? Is Nortonstowe going to become a pirate radio station? Oh boy, where are my false whiskers!”
“Now listen. When radio communication becomes of overriding importance, problems of quantity of information will become vital. Control will gradually pass to those people with the ability to handle the greatest volume of information, and I planned that Nortonstowe would be able to handle at least a hundred times as much as all other transmitters on the Earth put together.”
“This is fantasy, Chris! How about power supplies for one thing?”
“We’ve got our own diesel generators, and plenty of fuel.”
“But surely you can’t generate the tremendous amount of power that would be needed?”
“We don’t need a tremendous amount of power. I didn’t say we would have a hundred times the power of all other transmitters put together. I said we would have a hundred times the information-carrying capacity, which is quite a different thing. We shan’t be transmitting programmes to individual people. We shall be transmitting on quite low power to Governments all over the world. We shall become a sort of international information clearing- house. Governments will pass messages one to another through us. In short we shall become the nerve centre of world communication, and that is the sense in which we shall control world affairs. If that seems a bit of an anti- climax after my build-up, well, remember I’m not a melodramatic sort of person.”
“I’m coming to realize that. But how on earth do you propose to equip yourself with this information-carrying capacity?”
“Let me give you the theory of it first. It’s quite well known really. The reason it hasn’t been put into operation already is partly inertia, vested interest in existing equipment, and partly inconvenience — all messages have to be recorded before transmission.”
Kingsley settled himself comfortably in an armchair.
“Of course you know that, instead of transmitting radio waves continuously, as is usually done, it’s possible to transmit in bursts, in pulses. Let’s suppose that we can transmit three sorts of pulses: a short pulse, a medium pulse, and a long pulse. In practice the long pulse might last for perhaps twice the duration of the short pulse, and the medium pulse might be one and a half times as long. With a transmitter working in the range seven to ten metres — the usual range for long-distance work — and with the usual band width, it should be possible to transmit about ten thousand pulses per second. The three sorts of pulses could be arranged in any assigned order — ten thousand of ’em per second. Now suppose we use the medium pulses for indicating the ends of letters, words, and sentences. One medium pulse indicates the end of a letter, two medium pulses following each other indicate the end of a word, and three following each other indicate the end of a sentence. This leaves the long and the short pulses for transmitting letters. Suppose, for instance, we elect to use the Morse code. Then at an average, about three pulses are needed per letter. Reckoning on an average of five letters to a word, this means that about fifteen of the long and short pulses are required per word. Or, if we include the medium pulses for marking the letters, about twenty pulses are required per word. So at a rate of ten thousand pulses per second this gives a transmission rate of about five hundred words per second, compared with a normal transmitter which handles less than three words per second. So we should be at least a hundred times faster.”
“Five hundred words per second. My God, what a gabble!”
“Actually we will probably broaden our band width so that we can send upwards of a million pulses per second. We reckon that a hundred thousand words a second might be possible. The limitation lies in the compression and expansion of messages. Obviously no one can talk at a hundred thousand words per second, not even the politicians, thank goodness. So messages will have to be recorded on magnetic tape. The tape will then be scanned electronically at high speed. But there’s a limit to the speed of the scanning, at any rate with our present equipment.”
“Isn’t there one big snag in all this? What’s to stop the various Governments throughout the world from building the same sort of equipment?”
“Stupidity and inertia. As usual, nothing will be done until the crisis is on us. My one fear is that the politicians will be so lethargic that they won’t get single transmitters and receivers built, let alone whole batteries of stuff. We’re pushing ’em as hard as we can. For one thing they want information from us, and we’ve refused to provide this except by radio link. Another thing is that the whole ionosphere may get altered so that shorter wave- lengths have to be used. We’re preparing here to go as short as one centimetre. This is a point that we’re constantly warning ’em about, but they’re devilishly slow, slow in action and slow in wit.”
“Who here, by the way, is doing all this?”
“The radio astronomers. You probably know that a whole crowd came in from Manchester, Cambridge, and Sydney. There were more than enough for doing the radio astronomy so that they were jumping on each others’ heels. That was until they locked us in. Everybody got mad, the silly asses — as if it wasn’t obvious we should be locked up. Then I pointed out, with my usual tact, that anger wouldn’t help us, that the obvious thing to do was to lick the pants off the politicians by converting some of our radio astronomy stuff into communication equipment. It was, of course, discovered that we had far more electronic equipment than was necessary for radio astronomy purposes, So we soon had a veritable army of communication engineers at work. Already we could swamp the B.B.C. in the amount of information we could transmit, if we were so minded.”
“You know, Kingsley, I’m still bemused by this pulse business. It still seems to me incredible that our broadcasting system should go on pumping out two or three words a second, when they might be sending five hundred.”
“That’s a very easy one, Geoff. The human mouth transmits information at some two words per second. The human ear can only receive information at rates less than about three words per second. The great brains that control our destinies therefore design their electronic equipment to comply with these limitations even though electronically no such limitation exists. Don’t I keep telling everyone that our whole social system is archaic, with the real knowledge at the bottom and a whole crowd of hobbledehoys at the top?”
“Which makes a very fine exit line,” laughed Marlowe, “Speaking for myself, I’ve got a feeling that you’re in danger of oversimplifying things just a tiny bit!”
The Cloud Approaches
The Cloud was not visible during the following summer since it lay in the daytime sky, although it was keenly examined with the radio telescope at Nortonstowe.
The situation was better than the Prime Minister had expected. News from Nortonstowe suggested that the coming of the Cloud was not likely to lead to an impossible fuel crisis, for which he was heartily thankful. For the time being there was no fear of public alarm. With the exception of the Astronomer Royal, in whom he reposed great confidence, the threat from the scientists, particularly from Kingsley, had been safely canalized at Nortonstowe. True, ridiculous concessions had been made. Worst of all he had lost Parkinson. It had been
