I don’t know why I said this. It was not true.
He became excited. He related how he had followed Cruickshank down a narrow staircase where there was a workshop growing “like a shelf fungus” against his house.
The sanctus sanctorum was cold, but filled with wonderful lathes and drills and presses and, to one side, a large drawing table where he produced the plans he brought to Bowling Green Lane.
Cruickshank tried to hire him there and then.
But Sumper was unworthy. He was not a vise and lathe man. He had no maths or calculus at all.
“But you laughed,” insisted Cruickshank. “QED. You are my man.”
“I gave only the impression I had understood. All I did was smile.”
“Indeed.”
But anyone could see, Sumper told me, that a clever man would not have added 2 + 2 without good reason. 2 + 2 was predictable. He had smiled, because he had been waiting to see what the surprise would be. Of course he knew 171 was “wrong” but also he assumed it must be right. All he knew was: he who makes the programme is the god.
“One hundred per cent correct,” said Cruickshank. “Here is what I want from you: just shape the wood patterns from which the engine’s bronze cams will then be cast.”
“But you don’t need
“Then have a drink because I have my man.”
Sumper smiled. The Genius offered him a penny for his thoughts.
“I will tell you, Herr Brandling,” said Sumper. “I will tell you what I could never say to him. I was thinking I had arrived at my soul’s true home.”
Who would not envy him?
ALL MY LIFE, it has been assumed I was a dunderhead who would not understand, for instance, why his wife had moved her room.
Hence Sumper: Henry, you could not understand.
At the same time he was determined to test me out.
“The thing is, Herr Brandling, I had been peacefully asleep in bed.”
Not a squeak from me.
“I’ll wager you will not conceive what happened next?”
“Rather not, old chap.”
“I was being murdered.”
Clearly this was not true.
“No, no. A weeping man had fallen on me,” he declared, “like a monkey from the rafter. He bawled and struck me.”
It had been the middle of the night when the Superior Being, now in his nightgown, had thrown himself at Sumper, howling and striking at the sleeping man’s big face. Sumper’s first response had been characteristically violent, but his second thought was less expected—he took the old man in his arms and held him until he went to sleep.
Dear Pater, I thought. The horrors of old men in the night.
When dawn came, the employer had departed. Sumper dressed and descended to the breakfast table. And there was Cruickshank, reading from
“I was no doctor,” Sumper said. This did not prevent him diagnosing palsy.
In the months ahead, apparently, he decided that Cruickshank’s condition was not attached to Cruickshank but was, in a sense, Cruickshank himself. Cruickshank was the terror. He had moulded his body around the terror’s shape, deepened his own eyes, straightened his own mouth, set his jaw like steel.
Further, Sumper concluded, showing an unattractive astonishment at his own intelligence, the very trauma that brought Cruickshank each night flailing and wailing to the room upstairs, this same pain had also formed the Cruickshank Engine. The Engine and the Madness were the same, he said.
“Cruickshank’s family—his wife, two girls and a baby boy—had been lost at sea. You see that don’t you?”
I’m afraid I yawned. I did not mean to. Against my will I learned that the shipwreck had been solely the result of poor Admiralty charts. The Captain would have sworn on those tables as on a Bible but they led him to the rocks.
Mr. Cruickshank was a Genius, he shouted. He sought RATIONAL EXPLANATION for the cause of tragedy and he, Cruickshank himself, had personally examined the Admiralty tables and he had found them RIDDLED WITH HUMAN ERROR. It was unbearable that his family had been dashed and drowned not by fate or God or nature, but BY MISTAKE. Was I listening? These numeric errors haunted poor Cruickshank’s mind like angry bees, and for many months, while still in mourning, he had sat at his desk with his pencil in his hand and, slowly, carefully, corrected the errors in all their sickening multitudes. Perhaps he imagined that, as a result of these tedious labours, the dead would soon walk, the fire in the stove would light and the kitchen fill with the smell of Yorkshire pudding.
He notified “the ministry” of the miscalculations and the ministry printed errata sheets and these were sent out to the navy and the merchant fleet. But then, to Cruickshank’s horror, he found human error re-enter the charts as relentlessly as water through a leaking roof—many of the errata slips had been copied incorrectly. In 140 volumes of tables he found around 3,700 errata sheets that were as wrong as the errors they supposedly corrected. These astronomical tables were calculated by men with celluloid eyeshades who gloried in such titles as Computer or Chief Computer or Computer’s Boy. Their penmanship was such a wonder you might imagine it produced by lathe. Alas, they were simple clerks, with holes in their socks and onion on their breath, being so thoroughly human that they were unsuited to reliably repeating a simple action like addition.
As a result there were noxious errors in transcription, which spread without relent in the ground between the calculation and the printer, and then there were slip-ups in the typesetting, a cloud of them like locusts, and blunders of proofreading as numerous as grains of sand, each microscopic inaccuracy an Isle of Scylla, sufficient to cleave an oaken hull, and no matter how many nights the bereaved man occupied himself with the most menial arithmetic, the mistakes continued.
As a result of this obsession, according to Sumper, Cruickshank became ill. During his illness, or after his illness, certainly as a result of his illness, he began to consider how he would replace the pulp and fibre of the human brain with brass and steel, not some “gilded folly like Vaucanson’s which served only to amuse the rich and mindless.” Cruickshank removed all “lethal sloppiness” from his machine. Those were his exact words, said Sumper.
Cruickshank had previously kept sketchbooks of birds, and nature scenes, no beetle was too lowly for his interest. That is, his eyes had keenly sought to know and understand the natural world. But now all that bright curiosity turned inwards and his eyes, as often as not, rested on his shoes as he sought to invent a steam-driven automaton which would provide navigation charts without a single error. The engine would accept the numbers that were entered and then it would repeat additions to ten places. The machine would add and add and add, like the most dogged human, but without our species’ relentless tendency to error. And the results of these calculations would be kept from the murderous hands of human beings. The machine would produce the correct number and from these numbers it would set the type WITHOUT HUMAN INTERFERENCE and from the type it would make a mould and from the mould it would pour a printing plate which would WITHOUT HUMAN INTERFERENCE print the tables. He planned all this inside the grieving cavern of his mind, with equations going that way, and axles turning, cams moving in and out, levers interrupting and releasing, and calculating to seven orders of difference and thirty decimal places so every number was thirty to thirty-one digits long.
The Grieving Genius, said Sumper, walked the streets of London, all the while devising—completely in his head—a series of shapes that never existed on the earth before, and he saw how this three-dimensional cam would drive against that three-dimensional cam and how they would align on an axle. In comparison to this endeavour Vaucanson’s duck should be seen as exactly what it is—a machine to produce fake shit, excuse me.
These shapes CAME TO MY MASTER, Sumper said. He received every part COMPLETELY IN HIS HEAD. He drew the part with astonishing precision. He then taught Thigpen how to see the plan, and how to make the wood
