The gun was a handmade Rigby Bros. fowling piece, but certainly suitable for bunnies, a sixteen-gauge side-by-side double with Damascus-twist barrels. The water-patterned steel was beautiful, but not up to modern ammunition, so he had his gunsmith make loads that the weapon could digest without blowing apart. They produced quite the smelly smoke, the shells did, when touched off. The smith, George Walker, said he could substitute Pyrodex for the black powder he used, and the smoke would be lessened, but Goswell didn't care all that much. A couple of blasts of #8 birdshot would take Mr. Rabbit right out of the game — if he could but draw a bead on him. That was the trick, for the rabbit seemed to know when Goswell was armed and when he was not.
Applewhite held out a pair of earmuffs. Goswell glared at the butler.
'The doctor insists, milord.'
Goswell nodded. 'All right, give me the blasted things.' But secretly, he approved of the earmuffs. These were electronic hearing protectors, produced by one of Goswell's own companies in France — devil take the Frogs — and he had to admit they were useful devices. A circuit in the headset sensed incoming noise and immediately shut it out, reducing the loud blast to a small pop. However, when they were not picking up explosions, the muffs actually amplified regular sounds, so that one could hear better than normal. Truth be known, Goswell's hearing was not what it had been, and he was seriously considering the implants that would bring back his ability to pick up normal conversation, which had faded appreciably. The implants were apparently good for five or six years, using microbatteries that were somehow recharged by the vibrations of sound upon them. He knew a few chaps and one old lady who had undergone the surgical procedure, and all of them had been most satisfied with the results. Perhaps he would have it done. He had already had the laser surgery on his eyes, didn't even need his reading glasses unless he was very tired. It was a mixed blessing, technology, but now and again it did offer something worthwhile.
'After I pot this rabbit, have Stephens bring the car round. I'll be going to the club.'
'Yes, milord. Good hunting.'
Goswell smiled. 'Thank, you, Applewhite. I will get the rascal, indeed I will!'
Peel drove toward the meeting place where Bascomb-Coombs had directed him, still somewhat unsettled by this new twist in his fortunes. And fortune was certainly smiling upon him. Bascomb-Coombs had caused this morning a new account to be opened at an Indonesian bank, a numbered account upon which Peel could draw, and therein was the sum in Indonesian rupias equivalent to one million euros.
Just like that, Peel had become a millionaire, and the promise was for much more if he performed his new duties adequately.
The small office suite was off Old Kent Road, not far from the old South Eastern Gas Works. Not a place Peel would have picked, but perhaps that was just as well, for none of Peel's investigations had spotted the building.
He turned into the car park, shut the engine off, and walked to the two-story, squarish gray block. The windows were barred, and a guard sat behind a desk just inside the lobby. The guard checked a computer screen, matched the name and face on it to Peel's, and buzzed him through a locked door to a stair.
Peel climbed quickly, reached the second floor, and turned down the hall toward the office at the end. As he passed other offices, some with windows in their doors, he observed that they all appeared to be quite empty.
The last door on the right was unlocked, and he opened it and stepped inside.
'Ah, Major, right on time. I appreciate that. Come in, come in, let me show you around.'
There didn't appear to be much to see. In one corner was a computer desk, a holoprojector and workstation upon it and a leather rolling chair in front of it. A small fridge and stove sat to one side, and there was a fold-out couch next to that. A sign on a door past the couch identified it as a loo.
Peel raised one eyebrow, as if to say, Show me
Bascomb-Coombs smiled. 'Doesn't look like much, does it? But the real works are elsewhere, of course, at Lord Goswell's computer facility in Chelmsford. We are hooked into it telephonically, and to answer your question, yes, quite undetectably. I can do from here what I can do at Chelmsford, and nobody will be the wiser.'
'If you'll excuse my ignorance, Mr. Bascomb-Coombs, just what is it exactly that you do? I mean, I know about the device, what Goswell has told me of it, and I have seen the results, which are certainly quite impressive, but I'm not up to speed on how it works exactly.'
The scientist laughed. 'And I doubt seriously I could explain it to you. Turner's Dictum is that 'A thing can be told simply if the teller understands it properly,' but I'm not sure I entirely understand it myself. And please do not take offense, but I doubt that you have the mathematics and physics to comprehend it if I did have it all. At this stage, my computer is rather like a kitchen match. I can use it to light a fire handily, but I'm not totally conversant with the chemical processes that make it work.'
He smiled, and Peel smiled back. Had the man just called him stupid?
'I'll give you a basic lesson, if you want. You are somewhat familiar with ordinary computers?'
'Somewhat.'
'Then you know that most computers are Turing engines that use Boolean logic based on binary operations. You have zeros and ones — quantum bits of information called Qubits — and these are the only choices. It is either one or zero, period. In a quantum computer, however, one can get superposition of both at the same time. It doesn't seem reasonable on the face of it, but in quantum parallelism one can use all the possible values of all input registers simultaneously.'
Peel nodded, as if he had a fucking clue what the man was talking about.
Bascomb-Coombs went on: 'Using Shor's quantum factorization algorithm, one can see that factoring a large number can be done by a QC — quantum computer — in a very small fraction of the time the same number would take using ordinary hardware. A problem that a SuperCray might labor over for a few million years can be done in seconds by my QC. So for a practical matter like code breaking, the QC is vastly superior.'
Peel nodded. 'If so, why isn't everybody using these QCs?'
Bascomb-Coombs laughed again. 'Oh, they would much like to! But it isn't something one whips up in an old mayonnaise jar out in the woodshed. The problem is that the coherent state of a QC is usually destroyed as soon as it is affected by the surrounding environment. What this means is, as soon as you turn it on and try to access it, you destroy it. A bit of a trick to get around that. They've tried all kinds of things over the years: lasers, photon excitation, ion traps, optical traps, NMR, polarization, and even Bulk Spin-Resonance-quantum tea leaves, this last.
'Wineland and Monroe worked out the single quantum gate by trapping beryllium ions. Kimble and Turch polarized photons and did the same thing. NTC had some early success with nuclear magnetic resonance, and Chuang and Gershenfeld applied Grover's algorithm for a 2Q model, using the carbon and hydrogen atoms in a chloroform molecule. But the problem has always been multiplicity and stability. Until my unit.'
'How did you manage that, if it is so hard?'
'Because I am smarter than they are,' he said. It didn't sound like bragging and, given the results, apparently it wasn't.
'I lost you back when I said 'Qubits,' didn't I?'
'Before that, I'm afraid,' Peel admitted.
Bascomb-Coombs smiled. 'Don't feel bad, Major. There aren't a handful of physicists in the world who would understand how I've done what I've done, even with the working model in front of them. Your talents lie elsewhere. I shouldn't want to try and knock you about in a dark alley nor go against you on a battlefield.'
Peel acknowledged the compliment with a nod. 'Quite.'
'Anyway, what it all means is that I've got a computer that can do wondrous things, and picking locks is at the top of its list. Short of pulling the plug and removing it from any incoming communications, there isn't a computer on earth I can't break into. Money means nothing when you can enter any vault at will. Military secrets are at our beck. Nobody can hide anything from us.'
'Really? Then why aren't you king of the world?'
The man laughed yet again. 'I like you, Peel, you are so refreshing after years of mealy-mouthed scientific types. The simple answer is, the computer isn't perfect yet. It has a few glitches, and now and again, it goes down. Somewhere about half the time I use it, actually. So I am loath to waste my up time on frivolous things like money and power — at least until I get it more stable. That's where I'm spending my energies, on the system. Because
