Beyond Watkin, Richard suddenly discovered the source of the little girlish giggle that had greeted Reg's conjuring trick. Astonishingly enough it was a little girl. She was about eight years old with blonde hair and a glum look. She was sitting occasionally kicking pettishly at the table leg.
«Who's that?» Richard asked Reg in surprise.
«Who's what?» Reg asked Richard in surprise.
Richard inclined a finger surreptitiously in her direction. «The girl,» he whispered, «the very, very little girl. Is it some new maths professor?»
Reg peered round at her. «Do you know,» he said in astonishment, «I haven't the faintest idea. Never known anything like it. How extraordinary.»
At that moment the problem was solved by the man from the BBC, who suddenly wrenched himself out of the logical half-nelson into which his neighbours had got him, and told the girl off for kicking the table.
She stopped kicking the table, and instead kicked the air with redoubled vigour. He told her to try and enjoy herself, so she kicked him. This did something to bring a brief glimmer of pleasure into her glum evening, but it didn't last. Her father briefly shared with the table at large his feelings about baby-sitters who let people down, but nobody felt able to run with the topic.
«A major season of Buxtehude,» resumed the Director of Music, «is of course clearly long overdue. I'm sure you'll be looking forward to remedying this situation at the first opportunity.»
«Oh, er, yes,» replied the girl's father, spilling his soup, «er, that is… he's not the same one as Gluck, is he?»
The little girl kicked the table leg again. When her father looked sternly at her, she put her head on one side and mouthed a question at him.
«Not now,» he insisted at her as quietly as he could.
«When, then?»
«Later. Maybe. Later, we'll see.»
She hunched grumpily back in her seat. «You always say later,» she mouthed at him.
«Poor child,» murmured Reg. «There isn't a don at this table who doesn't behave exactly like that inside. Ah, thank you.» Their soup arrived, distracting his attention, and Richard's.
«So tell me,» said Reg, after they had both had a couple of spoonsful and arrived independently at the same conclusion, that it was not a taste explosion, «what you've been up to, my dear chap. Something to do with computers, I understand, and also to do with music. I thought you read English when you were here — though only, I realise, in your spare time.» He looked at Richard significantly over the rim of his soup spoon. «Now wait,» he interrupted before Richard even had a chance to start, «don't I vaguely remember that you had some sort of computer when you were here? When was it? 1977?»
«Well, what we called a computer in 1977 was really a kind of electric abacus, but…»
«Oh, now, don't underestimate the abacus,» said Reg. «In skilled hands it's a very sophisticated calculating device. Furthermore it requires no power, can be made with any materials you have to hand, and never goes bing in the middle of an important piece of work.»
«So an electric one would be particularly pointless,» said Richard.
«True enough,» conceded Reg.
«There really wasn't a lot this machine could do that you couldn't do yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble,» said Richard, «but it was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dimwitted pupil.»
Reg looked at him quizzically.
«I had no idea they were supposed to be in short supply,» he said.
«I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I'm sitting.»
«I'm sure. But look at it this way. What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?»
This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.
Richard continued, «What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn't that true?»
«It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils,» came a low growl from somewhere on the table, «without undergoing a pre-frontal lobotomy.»
«So I used to spend days struggling to write essays on this 16K machine that would have taken a couple of hours on a typewriter, but what was fascinating to me was the process of trying to explain to the machine what it was I wanted it to do. I virtually wrote my own word processor in BASIC. A simple search and replace routine would take about three hours.»
«I forget, did you ever get any essays done at all?»
«Well, not as such. No actual essays, but the reasons why not were absolutely fascinating. For instance, I discovered that…»
He broke off, laughing at himself.
«I was also playing keyboards in a rock group, of course,» he added.
«That didn't help.»
«Now, that I didn't know,» said Reg. «Your past has murkier things in it than I dreamed possible. A quality, I might add, that it shares with this soup.» He wiped his mouth with his napkin very carefully. «I must go and have a word with the kitchen staff one day. I would like to be sure that they are keeping the right bits and throwing the proper bits away. So. A rock group, you say. Well, well, well. Good heavens.»
«Yes,» said Richard. «We called ourselves The Reasonably Good Band, but in fact we weren't. Our intention was to be the Beatles of the early eighties, but we got much better financial and legal advice than the Beatles ever did, which was basically „Don't bother“, so we didn't. I left Cambridge and starved for three years.»
«But didn't I bump into you during that period,» said Reg, «and you said you were doing very well?»
«As a road sweeper, yes. There was an awful lot of mess on the roads. More than enough, I felt, to support an entire career. However, I got the sack for sweeping the mess on to another sweeper's patch.»
Reg shook his head. «The wrong career for you, I'm sure. There are plenty of vocations where such behaviour would ensure rapid preferment.»
«I tried a few — none of them much grander, though. And I kept none of them very long, because I was always too tired to do them properly.
I'd be found asleep slumped over the chicken sheds or filing cabinets — depending on what the job was. Been up all night with the computer you see, teaching it to play „Three Blind Mice“. It was an important goal for me.»
«I'm sure,» agreed Reg. «Thank you,» he said to the college servant who took his half-finished plate of soup from him, «thank you very much. „Three Blind Mice“, eh? Good. Good. So no doubt you succeeded eventually, and this accounts for your present celebrated status. Yes?»
«Well, there's a bit more to it than that.»
«I feared there might be. Pity you didn't bring it with you though.
It might have cheered up the poor young lady who is currently having our dull and crusty company forced upon her. A swift burst of „Three Blind Mice“ would probably do much to revive her spirits.» He leaned forward to look past his two right-hand neighbours at the girl, who was still sitting sagging in her chair.
«Hello,» he said.
She looked up in surprise, and then dropped her eyes shyly, swinging her legs again.
«Which do you think is worse,» enquired Reg, «the soup or the company?»
She gave a tiny, reluctant laugh and shrugged, still looking down.
«I think you're wise not to commit yourself at this stage,» continued Reg. «Myself, I'm waiting to see the carrots before I make any judgements. They've been boiling them since the weekend, but I fear it may not be enough. The only thing that could possibly be worse than the carrots is Watkin. He's the man with the silly glasses sitting between us. My name's Reg, by the way. Come over and kick me when you have a moment.» The girl giggled and glanced up at Watkin, who stiffened and made an appallingly unsuccessful attempt to smile goodnaturedly.