THE LONG MEMORY

by William Spencer

The computer’s memory was a long one. In fact, it could see all in the City, hear all and even tell all to Harben its attendant—but Harben’s mind was another thing altogether,..

* * * *

The light was dim in Harben’s tiny recording booth. He sat as usual, hunched forward, intent on the data screens, muttering almost soundlessly to himself.

There was just enough room for him to crouch between the control consoles and monitor panels. His little recording cubicle was far down in the depths of the earth, buried deep below ground level, if it could be said that there was any longer a “ground level”. The gigantic City, throbbing far above his head, towered loftily into the air and burrowed deep underground in its endless search for more space to spread itself.

Hemmed in as he was by equipment, Harben could just manage to turn his head, if he really wanted to, or stretch out his arms to reach the controls. But much more than that he could not do. Apparatus crowded him in on all sides. He was like an astronaut in one of those early primitive spacecraft, jam-packed with essential, bulky gear.

Some people might have found the situation oppressive … even claustrophobic. But Harben loved his work. That was the main thing, he told himself. If he simply had to get out, there was always the escape hatch behind him. All he had to do was press a button and wait ninety seconds while his chair rotated slowly backwards. Then by wriggling and squirming he could squeeze himself with an effort into the long narrow tunnel. Along this he had to crawl for about three hours, like a pot-holer in the darkness, to reach the escalator leading to the upper levels.

Perhaps it was fortunate that Harben was a short, slightly built person. He was not exactly a dwarf, but certainly undersized. That saved a little more vital space.

Of course Headquarters had many times tried to persuade him to accept more spacious working quarters. They’d offered him a roomy, well-lit office which he could pace around when things got too much for him. Or even a little rest-room or lounge. It was decent of them to make the gesture. But they knew, and Harben knew, that it was no more than a gesture. Underneath their generous, lavish offer and Harben’s polite, briefly-worded refusal, there lay the bitter realities which everyone knew made any improvement impossible. What dominated all other considerations, all planning, was the relentless pressure on space of the Records themselves.

Every day the space needed for the Records increased. The spools lay row upon row, snugly nestling against each other in the long automatic racks which permitted highspeed consultation of any section of any spool. Every day, something like a hundred thousand new racks were filled with newly recorded spools. And every few days a huge new storage building or underground cavern had to be brought into commission, to house the next crop of spools.

The space requirement for Records was now far and away the most important factor in City planning. The ever-multiplying spools steadily ate into the space allotted to the human population. Harben had seen, in his monitoring of life on the upper levels, the new flats being built to replace those which had been pulled down to make way for Records storage depots. The flats were smaller than ever before. They allowed each inhabitant only a fraction of the space considered to be the absolute human minimum only five years ago. Desperate little rat-holes they were … but necessarily so. The Records must have priority, that much was obvious to everyone.

And the unpalatable reality had to be faced that things were going to get even worse in the future. So much was clear, to Harben if to no one else.

He was in serious mood as he went on with the dictation of his monthly report to Headquarters.

Phrases shaped themselves in his mind, words arranged themselves in order, and thoughtfully he spoke them into the slender microphone poised like an insect’s antenna below his chin. He became a little breathless and found it an effort to articulate clearly, after being alone and mute for so long:

“The tape now being used is 0.1 micron wide and, with data accumulating at the present rate, storage-space requirements are increasing at the rate of 2 cubic kilometres per week.”

That should give them something to chew on, Harben thought wryly. Two cubic kilometres per week was over a hundred cubic kilometres per year. But they didn’t need a computer to work that out.

“With the additional stereo monitoring of supersonic frequencies, plus 3-D infrared surveillance, required under new Statute from the first of next month, it is estimated that storage requirements will increase by at least twenty cubic kilometres per year.”

Good. Let Headquarters mull that over.

It was obvious, really, even before they brought in the new channels.

Place a colour TV camera and stereo sound mikes in every room in every building in the City. Place one in every doorway, at every junction, every few metres along every roadway and walkway at every level. Suspend cameras in mid-air. Watch everything, from every angle, record every movement of everybody, every instant. Capture every word spoken, casual or profound, trivial or tragic, gay or gruesome. Record at all moments the expression on everyone’s face. See what they are doing, and how, and with whom. All that is obviously going to call for a lot of recording tape, and a lot of space in which to store the completed tape, with its priceless irreplaceable record.

Harben switched off the message-channel for a moment to ponder his next sentence. He liked to end his reports on a thoughtful note. Possibly even in a somewhat philosophical vein. It helped to round off what otherwise tended to be a rather forbidding mass of facts and figures.

In a few minutes he had composed his thoughts, and began dictating again, but more slowly:

“Paragraph. From time to time, in the past, there have been improvements in the packing density of information. It may be worth considering what further achievements are likely in this direction.

“Improvements have almost invariably been made by reducing the cross-section of the recording tape. At present our standard recording tape is a filament which measures 0.1 micron wide by o-oo8 micron thick. This replaced, three years ago, the previous standard, which was more than double these dimensions.”

Harben cleared his throat rather nervously. Now came the piece he’d long been brooding over. The punch-line of his report:

“It may be interesting to speculate on the ultimate possible packing density of information. It is thought that the limit will be reached when we have a recording filament which is only one molecule in cross-section. In other words it will consist of a string of single molecules joined end to end.

“It is clear that a physically viable tape could not be less than one molecule thick. Each bit of information would then be recorded by an individual molecule polarized in one direction or the other.”

Harben rubbed his chin with satisfaction. Good, that. One molecule thick. Kind of a continuous whisker. Give them something to work on. However, it didn’t do to let Headquarters get too optimistic. One had to be careful, or some starry-eyed theorist would run away with the impression that the storage problem was licked.

The next thing one knew, they would be adding extra channels to the monitoring spectrum. So perhaps he’d better end his report on a note of caution:

“A hypothetical filament as slender as this, if it proved technically possible, would represent a considerable economy in cross-section, compared with the present filament. However the gain would be less than at first appears.

“Since each bit of information would consist of a single molecule polarized in one direction or the other, information could be stored only in binary form. The present filament, on the other hand, permits recording in analogue form, with the result that in principle more information can be stored in a given length of tape. This difference in the form of the recording would offset to a considerable extent the gain resulting from reduced cross-section.”

Harben switched off the message channel and chuckled. He felt he had the H.Q. people in a cleft stick. They were mostly non-technical. Loads of paper qualifications, of course, but no real grasp.

He pictured them running to consult their own research boys about his report. A fat lot of good that would do them. His reasoning was sound, his conclusions were valid and there was no way round them.

Now for the final sting in the tail of his report. A last twist of the knife. He switched on again.

“It would thus appear that we are working close to the ultimate packing density for information, and any gain from thinner filaments would be quickly swallowed up by the absolute daily increase in information. Furthermore, much space would be required for converters to translate existing information to the new standard.

“Finally, if it were felt necessary to monitor more channels, for example in the ultraviolet or X-ray bands, this could completely wipe out any temporary gain from the adoption of a more slender filament. End.”

There, he’d said it. Harben reached forward and switched off the message channel with a gesture of finality, almost with a flourish.

All right. He’d told them. Perhaps he’d gone too far this time. If they didn’t like the tone of his reports, they could always replace him. But he reckoned they wouldn’t find it too easy to locate someone else who would stay cooped up, day after day, week after week, in this rabbit-hutch.

He’d meant to get in that stab about monitoring extra bands, come what may. Let them know (not know, but get a very faint inkling of the trouble he’d been caused, by their completely arbitrary decision to include supersonic and infrared bands in the spectrum of monitored frequencies. The new equipment he’d had to order at short notice. The almost fantastic ingenuity needed to fit the extra gear into the available space. Nobody at Headquarters appreciated any of these difficulties. They simply issued their pompous orders and then sat back in their plumply padded chairs and waited for the results to come in.

Harben passed the back of his hand wearily across his brow. Sometimes, these days, he felt tired. Perhaps it was all getting too much for him, what with all the reorganization and worry caused by the new bands. Perhaps he really needed to be replaced …

Also, nowadays, there were these blurred zones in his mind. It was as though there were something indistinct on the edge of his mind that he was trying to get clear, but couldn’t quite bring into focus. He suspected, although he couldn’t produce any evidence for it, that there were blank periods in his consciousness that he couldn’t account for. It was almost as though, for hours at a time, he had nodded asleep.

But no, that was impossible. Harben, like ninety-five per cent of his fellow citizens, had undergone the rather simple operation which made sleep and (in the ordinary sense) food, unnecessary. He drew his energy directly from the electric circuits which powered the monitoring equipment. He was only a rather more complex zone of the involved electronic circuitry that surrounded him.

So now, perhaps, he had better get on with it, and do some monitoring. Harben flicked a switch, and an entire panel of the idle screens in front of him flashed into life. The muted babble of a score of conversations blended together in his ears. Harben could, at will, bring forward any one conversation to the threshold of audibility, if it sounded interesting.

And very often it did sound interesting. That was the fascination of his job: to be able to peer into human life at every level, to see into every room, overhear every whisper, every word spoken in boredom or tenderness, in anger or passion.

Of course, in theory, he was supposed simply to check correct operation of the monitoring equipment throughout the City. That was what he was there for. But the system was largely self-correcting, and any major breakdown would have been instantly notified to him by the automatic circuits.

So he was free to be a wandering will-o’-the-wisp: to be here, there and everywhere, fleeting from one end of the City to the other as the mood took him.

There he was, effectively a prisoner within the enormous network of recording equipment, wedged in with kilometre upon kilometre of spools of recording tightly packed in the long racks, stretching in every direction, a solid block of information denser than honey in a well-stocked hive. There, somewhere near the centre, he sat hemmed in, scarcely able to move. So it seemed. But in reality he was everywhere, he was at every street-corner, in every doorway, in every room. He heard and saw everything, if he wished. And he could move with the speed of thought from one end of the City to the other, passing through closed doors as easily as a phantom, ascending and descending to every level at will.

He could even move through time. In the serried ranks of the Records lay everything that had happened since the very beginning, back to those earliest years when the monitoring was first started. No recording was ever destroyed, no ripple of significance erased, nothing faded from the huge memory.

In a matter of moments he could recapture any instant, any incident, from those innumerable past years. He could bring it back to life, glowing vividly on the coloured screens, and review it from many different angles simultaneously. So there were certain moments of time, vintage moments as it were, which he loved to revisit and re-live. Hunched in his little chair, he trembled with emotion as he participated vicariously in some moment when life seemed to declare itself, to be lived vividly and to the full.

Then, the secrets he knew. Sometimes he would follow the activities of the same person for days. Shamelessly. There was no escape from his all-seeing eyes, his eavesdropping ears. His victim, totally unaware of being the object of such thoroughgoing scrutiny, would lay bare the pattern of his life.

Harben loved to study the goings-on of nobodies, people who counted for nothing in the world. He found them fascinating, their lives full of unsuspected depths, and strange complications.

Harben watched also the public figures, the great men. He saw how in private, when the mask was laid aside, they showed the same little weaknesses, the same pettiness, as lesser men. There was not so much difference, after all.

Lovers he watched with a kind of clinical interest, tinged with prurience, and saw how their basic selfishness worked itself out. He saw the little cruelties and the big cruelties. The little infidelities and the big infidelities.

This was why Harben was dedicated to his job, why it gave him so much joy and satisfaction. He found it hard to understand why some people were said to be opposed to the monitoring system, and the whole apparatus of the Records.

Most citizens accepted the surveillance of the monitor cameras with a shrug of the shoulders. It was one more manifestation of modern society. It had to be taken in one’s stride, like the shortage of living space, the high rents and the crippling income-tax on couples who were unwise enough to produce children.

It was not pleasant, of course, to know that every detail of one’s life was being watched and recorded. Apart from the lack of any real privacy, which was embarrassing, to say the least, there were the things one did or said in moments of thoughtlessness or anger which one would prefer to be forgotten, not immortalized for all time.

There were compensations, for law-abiding citizens at least. And few citizens were not law-abiding. Crime had become almost unknown: it could not possibly pay. Who would attempt, for example, to rob a bank, when every detail of the planning, the crime itself and the “escape”, would be faithfully recorded on video-tape ? The police had only to look up the relevant Records and make their arrest. There was no question of looking for “clues”, when a complete colour tape was available for use by the prosecution.

Equally, it was impossible to lose anything. One might mislay something temporarily, that was all. For example, a girl might leave her handbag on a park bench. No one would be so foolish as to attempt to pilfer the contents. As soon as the loss was discovered it was simply a question of tracing the girl’s movements back to the moment when she was last in possession of the handbag. No problem at all…

* * * *

He was busily engaged in his normal occupation of roving from level to level, when his eye was caught by a red light on one of the consoles.

It showed that an emergency police check was being made on the Records. Alongside the red light there was a digital display which read 523-301-446. Out of curiosity Harben switched to the relevant channel and located the suspect on one of his screens.

Citizen 523-301-446 was a middle-aged man who looked ordinary enough, a minor technician in the Electricity Supply Department. At the point of time where Harben joined the channel, he was going about his normal affairs in what seemed a harmless-enough manner. But Harben thought that there was a tense look about his brows, as though he were preoccupied with some secret problem.

For some time he followed the man’s activities, without gaining any insight into his motives. It was necessary, of course, to skim rapidly through most of the Record at high speed. To follow it at normal speed was enormously time-consuming. Every day of the man’s activities would take twenty-four hours to survey in full.

The police had developed a technique to overcome this problem. They would employ a team of a thousand Investigators (or more if the case demanded it), each of whom would be given a slice of the suspect’s Record to survey at normal speed. In this way they could get through almost three years of tape in twenty-four hours. Significant passages of the Record were then noted and played back to the Chief Investigator, who might have to spend a whole week going through them, if the case proved involved.

Harben’s technique was different. He had no team of Investigators at his disposal, and his interest was strictly casual. So he simply ran forward through the Record at high speed, stopping to study any passage which looked interesting.

He was skimming through a sequence in which Citizen 523-301-446 was leaving his apartment, alone. Harben had already gleaned, from some brief snatches of conversation he had listened to, that the man had the personal name of Ford.

Harben switched to Autochase, a setting of the controls which automatically followed the movements of the designated person, cutting from camera to camera as necessary to get the best view. But he still kept the tape running at high speed.

There was something ludicrous about the way the man rushed like a maniac up an escalator and into a Superway car, which moved off as a rapid blur. Harben saw Ford emerge at the other end and plunge into an elevator, the doors of which closed with guillotine speed.

At the seventy-first level, Ford tore along the corridor and paused only the briefest fraction of a second to ring a doorbell.

The door burst open, and a dark-haired attractive girl instantly appeared in the doorway. Ford gave her a lightning peck on the cheek and then plunged headlong past her into the tiny, neat apartment.

After the briefest twitter of conversation, the man flung himself down on a chair, while the girl poured him a drink —or rather, seemed to slosh the sherry with lunatic suddenness, but unbelievable accuracy, into a glass, which she then jerked under the man’s nose without spilling a drop.

The grotesque effect was to some extent lost on Harben, who had run through more recordings at high speed than he cared to remember.

Their lips were fluttering again, and Harben turned up the sound. The result was a loud, shrill gibbering, like demented monkeys at play. More or less at random, to sample their conversation, Harben decided to switch over to normal speed. He seemed to have blundered on to, an interesting bit.

“… you wouldn’t be such a fool!” The girl’s eyes flashed icily, and she made no attempt to conceal the note of disgust in her voice.

She got up and walked a step or two away from the couch on which she had been sitting. There was a long silence in the softly lit room. Ford was sitting bent forward, gazing down at the floor, his head slumped between his shoulders.

He glanced up suddenly. His face wore a look of strain, as though conflicting emotions were tugging at him.

“I’m convinced it’s possible,” he muttered slowly, almost doubtfully.

“Then why has no one ever succeeded in the past?” Her rejoinder was swift and rather biting.

“Probably didn’t go about it the right way.”

The girl made a little movement of impatience. “So you are so clever that you are going to succeed where everyone else has failed!”

“There’s a chance.”

“What possible chance is there, when you’re being watched all the time. You’re being watched now.” She gestured towards the recording camera.

The man looked tired.

“They can’t watch everybody all of the time. There are ten thousand million people in the City. It would take another ten thousand million people, working full time, to watch them. They can’t do that.”

“But once they suspect… it’s all there in the Records.”

“Exactly. But there won’t be any Records.”

Harben tensed forward in his contoured chair with an almost convulsive movement.

No Records!

He turned the sound up louder, eager not to miss a word.

The man, at this moment, seemed to have convinced himself by his own argument. He now wore a look of dedicated fervour, the look of the heretic about to go to the stake.

Fantastic! thought Harben. Could Ford then be a member of S.A.D.A.R., the mysterious, almost legendary, underground movement, which was said to call itself the Society for the Abolition and Destruction of All Records? This secret society had never been proved to exist. Harben felt the thrill, electric and disturbing, yet gratifying, of stumbling upon the edge of the unknown.

Ford was exactly the man to be a member of SA.D.A.R.: inconspicuous, completely normal, a boring nonentity whom the police would never bother to watch.

A moment later Harben was brought down to earth with a jolt.

The girl was speaking again.

“So you’d do all this just because of the baby coming? I’ve told you he’ll accept it as his. He knows nothing about our … friendship.”

Her voice trembled and almost broke on the last word. Quite clearly, the impending arrival of a baby had caused the “friendship” to turn somewhat sour.

“When he finds he’s paying double tax, he’ll want to know the reason why. You know that every husband has the statutory right to consult his wife’s Records. Only a complete swine would invoke that right. But by your account, Trafford is just such a swine.”

“I never said he was a swine.” The girl was almost in tears. “At least he’s sane, which is more than you seem to be.”

“Sane!” Ford was clearly needled. “Look, I’ve explained the whole thing to you in detail. The magnetic bomb …”

“How do you know it will work?”

“The thing is absolutely straightforward. Conversion of heat energy to magnetic energy. Any schoolboy could construct a device. In this case the heat energy is released by a thermal charge.”

“All right. But how do you get it into position?”

“Inside the Records Centre ? That’s the only part which is at all tricky. I shall simply pose as a technician working in the supply tunnel…”

Harben relaxed. That old ploy … ! Nobody had ever got into the Records Centre as easily as that. The guard on the perimeter was absolute. It was a well-kept secret that no human being could ever penetrate the Records Centre and live. There was a zone of destructive radiation which screened every approach, above, below, all round. Only mechanisms could ply to and fro, bringing in the necessary supplies. Harben was the only living thing to exist deep inside the lethal zone.

“No, my friend,” thought Harben, as he casually switched off the channel, “you’ll have to do better than that.”

It was evident, from the fact that the police were checking his Record, that Ford had not done better than that. By now he was, no doubt, the late unlamented Ford. The police were merely making sure that he had no fellow conspirators, that he was not in fact linked to the legendary S.A.D.A.R. network of saboteurs.

Ford was nothing more than a clown, a clumsy bungling buffoon. But the thought of S.A.D.A.R. sent a shiver down Harben’s spine. The destruction of all Records!

It was not so much that Harben himself would probably perish in a holocaust of the Records Centre. That was an abstract consideration which did not worry him unduly. What really hurt were the emotional implications: the fact that anyone could want to destroy the Records.

To Harben the Records were sacred, the most beautiful and precious things in the world. His Records! He lived only for them. He was a mere human, with a life-span of two centuries at the most. But the Records were eternal.

Harben felt a warm gush of almost religious emotion as he contemplated the ageless beauty of the Records. May they last for ever, their preciousness increasing from age to age.

* * * *

Where was he? That strange shifting of consciousness again.

Whenever Harben became lost in contemplation of the transcendental beauty of the Records, he was liable to lose track of time. Did he go into some kind of trance, in which he lost normal consciousness ? He looked at the softly glowing face of the clock. Three hours unaccounted for.

But why did he have the metal fuser in his hand? His knees and elbows felt sore, as though he had spent hours crawling along the narrow corridors which penetrated the Records Centre in all directions. The corridors were there mainly for the maintenance mechanisms to whirr along. But Harben also had the freedom of the corridors, supervising the activities of the robots. He could crawl along a maze of narrow tunnels for vast distances, right up to the fringes of the lethal perimeter zone itself.

He had to check, at intervals, the work of the maintenance mechanisms. They were supposed, in theory, to keep all the equipment in tip-top condition, and they did just that. But there was always the faint possibility that someday, somewhere, an unforeseen failure would occur. It was almost a formality, but one couldn’t be too careful where the Records were concerned.

So Harben made routine checks at intervals to see that everything was in order. It entailed several days of tedious crawling along the narrow tunnels, peering and squinting into the complex wiring system, searching for the faulty connection or unserviceable sub-assembly that was never there. Harben tended to feel as if he were looking for a nonexistent needle in an infinitely large haystack.

This was not a job which Harben ever undertook eagerly. But his almost fanatical devotion to the safety of the Records drove him to perform it with agonizing thoroughness. Anyway, the next routine check was not due for another two months, so why the bruised knees and elbows ? The facts just didn’t add up, or make any kind of sense.

While he was musing on this problem, a disagreeable interruption occurred.

The large screen to the right of his chair flickered and glowed into life. An oversized three-dimensional image of the Sub-Assistant Overseer of Records looked squarely at Harben. His huge, oval, rather self-satisfied face appeared to be less than arms-length away.

Harben flinched. He always resented these intrusions into what he considered the privacy of his recording cubicle. He himself preferred to use the impersonal medium of the message tape when he wanted to get in touch with Headquarters. The time-lag entailed was negligible.

The Sub-Assistant cleared his throat portentously. If he was aware of Harben’s resentment at his using the visual channel, he gave no hint of it. His beefy face conveyed the unsquashable, bouncy good-humour of one who is accustomed to issuing orders and having them instantly obeyed. The synthetic friendliness of the Overseer’s manner made Harben recoil inwardly.

“And how are we, Harben, old man?” he said breezily. “Ticking over smoothly, I trust.”

“Thank you.” Harben’s voice was clipped, hovering only just on the verge of politeness. “You have read my report for the previous month?” He was getting breathless again.

“Of course, of course. Admirable document. There was just one tiny point I wanted to raise. Very much a routine query.”

The Overseer paused, expecting some sort of response, even if it were only a raised eyebrow. But Harben remained impassive, waiting.

“A small matter of ten thousand metres of connecting wire.”

Harben still remained silent.

“It was delivered on your order 7259/87, but there’s no record of its having been used, nor is it held in your Maintenance store.”

Harben blinked. His brain rapidly flickered backwards, groped for some explanation and found none. He was at a loss, acutely embarrassed at being caught on the wrong foot by H.Q. Normally, everything in the Records Centre functioned with the infallible accuracy of an auto-maintained computer. Anything less than that was a painful blow to Harben’s self-esteem.

“The matter will be looked into, Overseer. A report will be made in due course.”

“Thank you, Harben.” There was just a tiny edge of menace in the Overseer’s final remark. Prolonged confinement in refrigeration chambers … ? Exile on an isolation satellite … ? Naturally the Overseer would not wish to impose the full rigour of the law. But he had the authority, if it were needed. Harben got the message.

The Overseer’s big face faded from the screen. Harben was left groping for an explanation. Ten thousand metres of cable? Why on earth would he…? Harben couldn’t recall any need for such an order.

It was too absurd. And yet he couldn’t quite dismiss from his mind the nagging feeling that he knew something about it. The explanation, like a forgotten name, hovered just beyond the grasp of his mind.

For some reason, Harben now found his eyes wandering towards the big clock, with its five dials and its number patterns rippling and changing ceaselessly. He watched the flickering displays chopping the seconds into milliseconds, and tried to understand why he had suddenly become fascinated by this instrument.

The clock had always been one of the most prominent objects in his little cubicle, but beyond consulting it when necessary he had never given it a second thought. Until now.

The idea came strongly to Harben that if only he could understand its message, the clock had some connection with the missing lengths of wire. But what ? He wished he knew. He wrestled with his memory, but could get nothing coherent out of it. Whatever the link was, he felt that it was important. Very important. This much he sensed from the pressure which he now felt coming from some level of his mind which he could not quite bring into conscious awareness.

“Twenty fifty-nine,” he thought.

“Twenty fifty-nine.”

That was the time. That was the moment. Fifteen seconds to go.

His mind gave a huge lurch, a leap upwards. It was strange and frightening. But somewhere, deep down, Harben felt the surging of a savage joy, a nameless sense of triumph which made his ordinary little worries fade into insignificance.

Five seconds to go.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

There was a sharp whiplash crack, of energy suddenly released, and the light in the cubicle winked and dimmed. By the fading light he saw instrument needles and gauges on the control panels falling away limply towards zero.

Harben looked at the clock. It had stopped at precisely 2059 hours.

A strange gurgle of joy came from Harben’s throat. “I’ve done it, done it,” he shouted. What had he done? Suddenly he knew: he had destroyed the Records. He, Harben, guardian of the Records, had utterly destroyed them. What so many had tried to achieve, and failed, he had splendidly brought off.

Working from within, he had worked cunningly. So complete had been the concealment of his efforts, that not even his conscious mind had been in the secret.

On the surface of his mind, Harben had fretted over the safety of the Records, had fussed over routine reports, had faced the Overseers with a mixture of cringing and superciliousness. Meanwhile, the dark Harben, the unknown Harben, the real Harben, had laid his plans and carried them out in the deep unsurveyed tunnels of the Records Centre.

It was all so simple. He saw quite clearly now. There had been no need for a magnetic bomb. The Centre itself was potentially its own magnetic generator, with its millions of metres of wire, its billions of watts of energy already on tap.

It was simply a matter of making the right connections … Or rather, of preparing for connections which should all be made simultaneously at the programmed instant. Then the entire energy of the Centre was released in a huge electric whirlpool, a coiling current which generated its own gigantic pulse of magnetism, wiping clean every record.

Wiping away the memory of everything.

Harben dwelt for a moment peacefully on that thought as his body began to relax.

The circuits which supplied him with life had also been torn asunder in the huge wave of energy. But it did not matter. As Harben sank slowly towards unconsciousness, wondering whether the police would reach him in time, he knew only one thing.

The slate had been wiped clean.