‘A regular Mr Fixit.’ There was no admiration in his voice.
‘I’ve earned my keep,’ I said.
‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Schlegel. He gave me the big Grade A – approved by the Department of Health – smile. It wasn’t reassuring.
From the next room there came the shouts of children above the noise of the TV. There was a patter of tiny feet as someone screamed through the house, slammed the kitchen door twice and then started throwing the dustbin lids at the compost heap. Schlegel rubbed his face. ‘When you and Ferdy do those historical studies, who operates the computer?’
‘We don’t have the historical studies out on the War Table, with a dozen plotters, and talk-on, and all the visual display units lit up.’
‘No?’
‘A lot of it is simple sums that we can do more quickly on the machine than by hand.’
‘You use the computer as an adding machine?’
‘No, that’s overstating it. I write a low-level symbolic programme carefully. Then we run it with variations of data, and analyse the output in Ferdy’s office. There’s not much computer time.’
‘You write the programme?’
I nodded, and sank some of my drink.
Schlegel said, ‘How many people in the Studies Group can write a programme and all the rest?’
‘By all the rest, you mean, get what you want out of storage into the arithmetic, process it and bring it out of the output?’
‘That’s what I mean.’
‘Not many. The policy has always been …’
‘Oh, I know what the policy has been, and my being here is the result of it.’ He stood up. ‘Would it surprise you to hear that I can’t work the damn thing?’
‘It would surprise me to hear that you can. Directors are not usually chosen because they can work the computer.’
‘That’s what I mean. OK, well I need someone who knows what goes on in the Group and who can operate the hardware. What would you say if I asked you to be a PA for me?’
‘Less work, more money?’
‘Don’t give me that stuff. Not when you go in to do Ferdy’s historical stuff for free nearly every Saturday. More money maybe, but not much.’
Mrs Schlegel tapped on the door and was admitted. She’d changed into a shirt-waist dress and English shoes and a necklace. Her dark hair was tied back in a tail. Schlegel gave a soft low whistle. ‘Now there’s a tribute, feller. And don’t bet a million dollars that my daughters are not also in skirts and fancy clothes.’
‘They are,’ said Helen Schlegel. She smiled. She was carrying a tray loaded with bacon, lettuce and tomato toasted sandwiches, and coffee in a large silver vacuum jug. ‘I’m sorry it’s only sandwiches,’ she said again.
‘Don’t believe her,’ said Schlegel. ‘Without you here we would have got only peanut butter and stale crackers.’
‘Chas!’ She turned to me. ‘Those have a lot of English mustard. Chas likes them like that.’
I nodded. It came as no surprise.
‘He’s going to be my new PA,’ said Schlegel.
‘He must be out of his mind,’ said Mrs Schlegel. ‘Cream?’
‘There’s a lot more money in it,’ I said hurriedly. ‘Yes, please. Yes, two sugars.’
‘I’d want the keys to the mint,’ said Mrs Schlegel.
‘And she thinks I’ve got them,’ explained Schlegel. He bit into a sandwich. ‘Hey, that’s good, Helen. Is this bacon from the guy in the village?’
‘I’m too embarrassed to go there any more.’ She left. It was clearly not a subject she wanted to pursue.
‘He needed telling,’ said Schlegel. He turned to me. ‘Yes, clear up what you are doing in the Blue Suite Staff Room …’ He picked a piece of bacon out of his teeth and threw it into an ashtray. ‘I’ll bet she did get it from that bastard in the village,’ he said. ‘And meanwhile we’ll put a coat of paint on that office where the tapes used to be stored. Choose some furniture. Your secretary can stay where she is for the time being. OK?’
‘OK.’
‘This history stuff with Foxwell, you say it’s low-level symbolic. So why do we use autocode for our day to day stuff?’
I got the idea. My job as Schlegel’s assistant was to prime him for explosions in all departments. I said, ‘It makes much more work when we programme the machine language for the historical studies but it keeps the machine time down. It saves a lot of money that way.’
‘Great.’
‘Also with the historical stuff we nearly always run the same battle with varying data to see what might have happened if … you know the kind of thing.’
‘But tell me.’
‘The Battle of Britain that we’re doing now … First we run the whole battle through – Reavley Rules …’
‘What’s that?’
‘Ground scale determines the time between moves. No extension of move time. We played it through three times using the historical data of the battle. We usually do repeats to see if the outcome of a battle was more or less inevitable or whether it was due to some combination of accidents, or freak weather, or whatever.’
‘What kind of changed facts did you programme into the battle?’ said Schlegel.
‘So far we’ve only done fuel loads. During the battle the Germans had long-range drop tanks for the single-seat fighters, but didn’t use them. Once you programme double fuel loads for the fighters, there are many permutations for the bombing attacks. We can vary the route to come in over the North Sea. We can double the range, bringing more cities under attack and so thinning the defences. We can keep to the routes and attacks actually used, but extend fighter escort time over the target by nearly an hour. When you have that many variations to run, it’s worth bringing it right the way down, because machine time can be reduced to a quarter of autocode time.’
‘But if you were running it only once?’
‘We seldom do that. Once or twice we’ve played out a battle like a chess game but Ferdy always wins. So I’ve lost enthusiasm.’
‘Sure,’ said Schlegel, and nodded in affirmation of my good sense.
There was a silence in the house, and the countryside was still. The clouds had rolled back to reveal a large patch of clear blue sky. Sunlight showed up the dust of winter on the austere metal desk at which Schlegel sat. On the wall behind it there was a collection of framed photographs and documents recording Schlegel’s service career. Here was a cocky crew-cut trainee in a Stearman biplane on some sunny American airfield in World War Two; a smiling fighter pilot with two swastikas newly painted alongside the cockpit; a captain hosed-down after some final tropical-island mission; and a hollow-cheeked survivor being assisted out of a helicopter. There were half a dozen group photos, too: Marine flyers with Schlegel moving ever closer to the centre chair.
While I was looking at his photos there was the distant roar of a formation of F-4s. We saw them as dots upon the blue sky as they headed north.
Schlegel guessed that they were going to the bombing range near King’s Lynn. ‘They’ll turn north-west,’ he said, and no sooner had he spoken the words than the formation changed direction. I turned back to the sandwiches rather than encourage him. ‘Told you,’ he