Waterfalls and Glass #7

Track 3, Sector 2:

It was now just after eleven and there was a line for both the washers and dryers. This was not the first time Monica had lost herself at the laundry. It was time for Plan B, the undergraduate laundry. Fortunately, it was a beautiful Saturday. Few of the students were likely to be moving under their own steam at such an early hour and fewer still were likely to be sitting inside doing their laundry. She packed the wet clothes back in with the others and headed out to the Dodge. Ten minutes later, the Dart and its staff parking decal were nestled next to the laundry building with an air of official purpose. She found a pair of washers side-by-side and made a fresh start. She could have brought a month's laundry and put it into a thrumming bank of 8 washers without a wait. If only computers could be chained together as easily as washing machines! With that underway, there was nothing for it but a quick read. Unfortunately, Monica had outrun her own supply lines here and already finished the Tarrytown. Her desk, and plenty of other things to read, were a block away in the old armory and the key was on her ring.

With the better part of her professional wardrobe now submerged, she set off along the campus alleyway that connected the back of the laundry to the back of the old armory and was back inside just under twelve hours after she left. And in the same dress! She had only been inside for a couple of minutes when she found Walter Hatch sitting at a desk looking over accounting reports for the project. It was hard for her to gauge his mood directly from behind but she could read volumes from the way the reports were splayed around him. She noticed first that the technical reports had been pushed aside but were otherwise undisturbed. Walter was rummaging only through the financials. The second thing she noticed was that they were all open and none to corresponding points. He wasn't looking for something. He was looking for anything. He stirred as she came up behind him and turned in his chair.

"Miss Lamm. I had understood that you kept famous hours but I didn't know that you actually lived here. I hope the project is collecting rent!"

Hatch clicked a candy against his teeth and Monica noticed a pile of waxy paper wrappers on the edge of the desk. Food wrappers were one of the worst things that could get sucked into the card readers. Monica imagined a automated Pied Piper that stole away the village children by heating morsels of trapped sweets until the aroma and the steady drumbeat of the machine were irresistable. One by one they would be sucked in and sorted and marched away on a tune. She was not so far from the mark. Food invited rodents and other creatures into the machines and once inside they found the wire insulation almost as tasty. Focusing back on Hatch, she realized that even his off-the-cuff remarks had a punchline about what he would pay.

"Mr. Hatch, I don't live here. If you address me as Dr. Lamm, it will save you a keystroke and the expense of that much type ribbon."

"Hah. Good one, ... Lamm. Listen, I bet you can help me out here. Now that was a nice show last night, but the fact is that there would be almost nothing to see in some of these cabinets, correct?"

"Well that's right. Merrimac won't even start fabrication of the final assemblies until cabinet 1 is approved for series production. One of the technical binders you have there shows the current boards loaded in each cabinet."

"That's right. Why would I pay for them, just to pay for them again once they are finally sorted out. I might as well buy pallets of expensive rocks on the first go round."

"Mr. Hatch, you are actually buying rocks. That's what transistors are. That's part of what's so neat about them."

"Lamm ... yes, that's all fine. The question I have about my boxes of rocks at the moment is why. Why has the fluid been changed three times in the last quarter. Why do the empty cabinets have fluid in them at all? Why are they even here?"

Monica briefly had the look of a statistical calculator into which a deck of cards was being dropped. Da Da Da Da Da Th Th Th Th Ch Ch Ch Ch Thunk, all sorted. She felt that she was about to be asked series of silly questions like this and so relaxed somewhat. All she had to do was deploy plain facts and cool logic.

"Well, they are here, and filled, and powered so that we can make sure the plumbing works, the power works, the cooling works, and that the floors work."

"The floors?"

"The 1200 is a 120 ton machine, so yes, the floors. If the floor level has deflected more than half an inch below the pre-installation level after six months, we need to perform a new structural assessment and potentially remediate. We would prefer to do that before the machine is fully commissioned."

"And why has it been refilled three times in the last two months?"

"Well, those decisions are largely made by Denbridge."

"By Denbridge? Boy, you have really let the fox into the machinery room! You're letting the firm that makes and sells the ... cooling oil decide when to drain the machine? Next are you letting the animals run the whole zoo? Letting the inmates run the asylum? Letting the computer write the program?"

"Yes. Yes. No. No. The last one is a very interesting question but maybe not related. Merrimac uses Denbridge as subcontract vendor for dielectric immersion cooling. Their contract calls for a fluid filtration plant to be installed on-site and plumbed into the machine by the second quarter of next year. Until then, we drain and refill the machine when Denbridge technicians tell us that contamination or heat has compromised the dielectric properties of the fluid."

"You just confirmed with bi-electric babble exactly what I'm getting at! You're letting Denbridge decide when to sell you new magic oil that has a list price of nearly three hundred dollars a gallon! And if I recall correctly, the system takes somewhere around two thousand gallons of the stuff. That's around a half a million dollars at a shot. Do that three times and it's surely the cost of a fighter jet! It must be the cost of a new Army tank with each top up."

"Oh, I see. I understand your confusion. Neither Merrimac nor Lapointe are paying Denbridge for the fluid. In fact, it's almost the other way around. As part of our acquisition agreement, the government acquired a license to key patents for the liquid. You can even contract with another firm to make it for you for this machine. A second source supplier for the liquid was a key concession that the government insisted on. Under the current arrangement, Denbridge earns a fee for cooling based on performance and they are free to manage their consumables as required at their own expense. As you say, the liquid is quite expensive so I would imagine that they treat it as such. On the other hand, they are responsible for damage to the machine caused by cooling or dielectric failure and the machine is also very expensive."

"Well, as long as I'm not paying for it that's the most important thing. So they are taking it away to clean it up somewhere and bringing it back?"

"I really don't know. I know that they are still developing the new high-flow filter media that the full system will require, so I suppose that they probably do. Some employees of Denbridge got a ticket for dumping a drum of it down the sewer but we're not responsible for the ticket. In any case, there must be some substantial difference between the value of the fluid new and used if they are willing to just throw it away. The fluid itself is supposed to be stable but the contaminants are a different matter."

Monica had heard Denbridge technicians remark that used fluid contained small amounts of gold, silver, palladium, and other precious metals that were shed from the machine in the course of its operation but it was hard to believe that these could be extracted at any profit. She decided not to mention it lest Walter Hatch propose some new assay process. There was more silver in the half dollar coin she had left Panos than could ever be recovered from the coolant.

"Well, I'm from Census, not the Army Corps of Engineers or the Fish and Wildlife Service, and we don't count drums of liquid or fish or anything like that so I really don't care as long as I don't pay."

"Well, they say the fluid is harmless anyway and lasts practically forever. I think they got the ticket because they told the officer it was dielectric oil and he thought it was something like old motor oil and that a whole drum at once was more than should be put down the sewer."

"So tell me again exactly what is being cooled at the moment if most of the cabinets are empty?"

"Oh. We have simulated loads in the other cabinets to assess the total cooling performance before we install the final components. We don't want to install a larger system than we can cool and watch it burn up."

"Well, that sounds sensible enough, but how do you simulate that and how much am I paying for the simulation? We can't simulate the census, after all, so I'm not convinced I see the taxpayer value in sending money down the sewer on that."

"Oh, the load simulators are just large heating elements from an electric oven. They take as much power as we estimate the system will consume and generate the same heat. You did pay for that but they are very inexpensive. I think it's a standard Whirlpool part made in Benton Harbor. You could probably get them from the appliance repair shop downtown."

"So this simulation is consuming as much electric power as the whole system but doing nothing? It hardly matters what your stove parts cost if I'm paying to heat and then cool the whole thing for no purpose. An empty-headed computer full of stove parts is exactly what I should have expected when I let Allen put a woman in charge."

"I don't know if you should have expected it or not but I was pleased with the result. Replacing the custom heating elements Merrimac proposed with stove elements was my idea and it saved fifteen thousand dollars and at least a month. You are not paying for the power directly anyway. Remember that this machine is direct hydroelectric. We refurbished the old teaching dam turbines and they drive the machine through transmission lines that we upgraded to ten-thousand volt. The machine controls the dam works by teletype according to near-future demand based on special instructions in the program deck. So the power itself costs almost nothing beyond the upfront cost to retrofit the dam. Census and Lapointe split the costs of the dam refurbishment after your bureau made it clear that they wanted to reduce the long-term operating costs of the machine. Denbridge rewound the turbine stators with a new kind of micro-enamel wire as a gift to the school. That alone got us 15% more power at absolutely no cost to you."

"Look, Lamm. Maybe they didn't let you in on it but there is something funny about this whole business. I have been acquiring data processing systems for Census for 20 years and none of those systems has been like this. There's always a big setback or a cost overrun or some expensive patent litigation and all you're giving me are neat little answers about why tomorrow's computer is going to run on nothing but rainbows and I'll be able to tally all of America from this desk. I'll just pop the census into the toaster and set it to dark and wait for it to go ding?"

"The teletypes do have a bell."

"That's what Dr. Lamm has to say?"

"What other question did you ask but whether you should wait for it to go ding? I can't tell you that but I can tell you that this machine will let you sit here at this desk and wait for your program to do that if you want. Your program ... your program can play Jingle Bells. well, the first seven notes anyway. And yes, someday you will be able to tally whatever you want about the census not from a teletype at that desk but from an entire computer that fits in a cabinet next to that desk. Here."

And with that Monica opened a drawer in the desk and rummaged for a sheet of paper and a pen with some ink left in the cartridge. She drew a graph that superimposed the rate of computer improvement from Census' original Hollerith equipment up to the present with the growth of the American population.

"Mr. Hatch, if the population of the US continues to grow at its current leisurely rate, we will have computer systems that can hold the age of every American in memory simultaneously before I retire."

This was a boast, but an informed one. Still, Monica wondered if there was an American alive who was more than 127 years old, the largest small integer the machine could represent. She had already started down the path of an imaginary Census Caper, like the Tarrytowns maybe, where deep agents of the Census Bureau dispatch Americans over 117 years old after every census so that they don't show up on the rolls next time and wreak havoc with the data storage. Interesting, but it might need to be set in the future otherwise there wouldn't be anybody even that old to bump off. Now this was starting to sound like science fiction and Monica didn't really care for that.

"This is the same little speech I get from every idealistic computer type. Why with vacuum tubes instead of relays, we will do this so much better someday. With transistors instead of tubes, with better transistors... Now it's integrated transistors whatever the hell those are. Well, the Census has been integrated since 1870. None of those transistors solve our biggest problem, which is that we have to hire an army of people to go out and actually count and an army of people to put the data into whatever computer we have. Well, the Navy can keep a ship in the fleet for twenty years or more. I just want the same thing for Census computers. Something that lasts, something that can get a fresh coat of paint when it needs it, and something we can put spare parts into even if the company that built it goes under. Not one single computer I have worked with at Census has ever lasted long enough to get a fresh coat of paint. Look at FOSDIC, though. We rolled that out for the big six-oh and that's got legs. Turn those questionnaires into pencil circles, put them on microfilm – something real, Lamm – and we read those as fast as we please. We'll be able to use FOSDIC long after I've migrated from the Census list to the the death index kept by those morbid bastards over at Social Security.".

"Mr. Hatch, we can certainly repaint the machines if you like but I don't think they really need it. We keep them indoors. I think they could stay here 50 years and not need paint. You have all the rights you need to obtain spares for this machine indefinitely and you have all the listings for the programs necessary to operate the machine. If you want to operate the world's first computer museum right here and keep this one going forever, I think you have everything you need to do that. As for FOSDIC, all I can say is that Lapointe is Census' closest research partner for information processing fluids. I can tell you that you that the volume of liquid photographic developers and wastes involved in photo-transfer FOSDIC will look like Niagra compared to the fluid cycle here."

"Not only will FOSDIC work in '70 and '80 and '90, it worked in '60. It wasn't an IOU for a future system. Lamm, do you know why Census is at the forefront of data automation?"

"Any cost-benefit analysis would support that position. It's obvious."

"Lamm, the Government of the United States does not operate on a principle of obvious. Or on a basis of cost-benefit analysis. Central planning committies and collectives of workers just doing the obvious is how commies do things. I'm no commie. The Census is at the forefront of data automation because it would be unconstitutional for us to fail. We can lose a war, Lamm, there's nothing in the constitution about that. Hell, there's no Navy in there. But we can't lose a census. If you become the reason we fail, what does that make you?"

"Is this a technical question about the machine, a contract question, or a staffing question with potentially adverse personnel action. Because we should reqlly have departmental or union representation present depending on which you mean."

"Lamm, it's a rheostatical question."

Monica shifted her weight to put her left heel on her right toes so she could press just hard enough to keep her from asking a rhetorical question about rheostats. But she pressed harder than that and it was so lovely. Walter Hatch's voice was turned down as if by rheostat and she was no longer really listening to his words. He was like a noisy electric with no flow control and it wouldn't really bother him if she dropped a few characters.

"If I go into a museum and see George Washinton's ax and the placard says 'head replaced twice, handle replaced three times', I don't care if it's really the original ax or not, though I'll suspect that the curator is dealing in ax parts out of the back door. I care about whether it's an ax. If they show just a hickory stick labeled 'Washington's Ax' and the placard says Washington paid three million dollars for an ax and the toolmaker gave him this stick and told him to get spare parts anywhere he wanted then ... well then I hope there might still be a stain from where Washington used the stick on the poor fellow."

This sounded to Monica like a threat but Walter's feet didn't look to Monica like threatening feet. His jacket slumped along his hunched shoulders in a defeated way. Jacket. Stain! Monica had forgotten all about her laundry for the second time in one day.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Hatch, I really have to go. I've just thought of something." and she turned and headed for the door, no longer thinking of Walter Hatch at all.

"Wait, I didn't mean to.. I mean ..." whatever he had to say after that was lost to the large dark space of the old armory and to sounds of hustle that filled Monica's ears on the way back down the alley to the laundry.