Stillness & Shadows John Gardner (nice books to read .txt) 📖

look still questioning, Professor Weintraub cocked his head, thought for an instant, then said: “When you talk about an ordinary engineer you’re talking about a man who’s, so to speak, impacted in the physical universe. What he does is ruled by its physical laws; in the end he can do only what may be lawfully done. When some device he creates doesn’t work, he can’t always know by his own reasoning alone whether he’s on the verge of success—some small adjustment—or hopelessly lost, wandered into some closet from which there’s no exit. He has to turn to his teachers, his colleagues, his books—appeal to real experience for some clue to what’s gone wrong. But the computer programmer is in a different situation. He creates a universe for which he alone is the lawgiver—or at least that’s his aim. And of course on a computer, it’s possible to create universes of almost unlimited complexity. One may create, for example, worlds in which there’s no gravity, or in which two bodies attract each other, not by Newton’s inverse-square law, but by an inverse-cube law, or in which time dances forward and backward in obedience to a choreography as simple or complex as one wills. Moreover, and this is the crucial point, systems programmed in this way can act out their scripts. They compliantly obey their laws and vividly exhibit their obedient behavior. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor has ever exercised such absolute authority or commanded such unswervingly dutiful troops. Obviously, power like that can be addictive.” Professor Weintraub shook his head again, at once quizzical and sad, and opened the door. “I’ll lead you to the front office,” he said. “Believe me, you’d never find it.”

“Yes, thank you,” Craine said. “You’re right, it’s quite a maze.” Looking down the sterile hallway, leading to other hallways at either end, he had no idea which direction he had to go. As Weintraub turned to the right, then hesitated, waiting for him, Craine said, “So this Britt’s one of the addicts.”

“Very much so. They’re everywhere, you know—wherever you find computer centers, which is to say in countless places in the United States and in virtually every other industrial region of the world … bright young men like Frank, there, of dishevelled appearance, usually with sunken, glowing eyes. They sit there at their consoles, arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, watching the typewriter ball, staring like the gambler who keeps his eyes riveted on the dice. When he’s not sitting there at the console, transfixed, the hacker—that’s what they call themselves, ‘hackers’—the hacker sits at a table strewn with computer printouts, poring over them like a rabbi demonically possessed by some cabalistic text. They work till they drop—twenty, thirty hours at a time. If they can arrange it, they have their food brought in to them—coffee, Cokes, sandwiches. If you let them, they sleep on cots or bedrolls near the computer—but only a few hours, then back to the console or the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all show plainly how little they care about our so-called reality. They exist only through and for the computers. Compulsive programmers. Hackers, they call themselves. They’re an international phenomenon.” He caught Craine’s elbow as he started to turn left where they had to continue straight. “This way.”

“Ah, yes.” Quickly he asked, “Why do computer centers put up with them? They’re not working on real projects, if I understand what you’ve said—”

“They’re useful, that’s all. They’re like the ‘friendly’ parasites in the human body: they’re not part of us, exactly, but we can’t live without them. The hacker is usually a superb technician. He knows every detail of the computer he works on, its peripheral equipment, the computer’s operating system, and so on. He’s tolerated around the center because of what he knows and because he can write small subsystem programs very fast, that is, in one or two sessions of, say, twenty hours each. Before long, in fact, the center may find itself using any number of his programs. The trouble is—as you can guess from what I’ve said—a hacker will almost never document his programs once he stops working on them, with the result that a center may come to depend on him to teach the use of the programs, how to maintain them, and so on—programs whose structure only he—if anyone—understands.”

“I’m beginning to understand why you called this operation what you did at the start,” Craine said. “Bedlam.” They were now in the first room Weintraub had brought him into. He recognized the door that led to the reception room, the secretaries’ desks.

Weintraub smiled back a little distantly; Craine could feel the man withdrawing to whatever complex thought Craine’s arrival had interrupted. “I suppose I haven’t given you a very favorable impression of our work,” he said. “The other side, of course, is that for some of us it’s extremely exciting work—I can no more tell you how exciting it is, to a man like myself, to say nothing of a man like Frank Britt …” He reached for the doorknob but then hesitated before turning it, wanting to finish his thought. “I’ve told you how things can go wrong in computer work. But believe me, when they go right—” He opened the door and bowed, letting Craine go first.

As soon as they entered the reception room, they both knew in an instant that something was wrong. The secretaries both looked up at once, with an expression Craine knew but could not place, one that froze him where he stood. In Professor Furth’s office—the door stood open—the young man Craine had seen before somewhere, Dennis Reed, was hunting for something in the books and papers on Furth’s desk, his face solemn, squeezed shut with concentration. There was another man at his left, a gaunt, dishevelled black in glasses and fatigue cap. The minute Dennis Reed saw Craine watching him he jumped