Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [73]
I am the second programmer. Skiller has set it up well. Everything fits. The programme was set up beforehand, and the house, the copybook, my own flowchart and my computer were to do nothing more than carry it out. I'm stuck here inputting and outputting the data of a story I can't change. There's no point in my putting myself in the computer: Waldemar will not go up to the house on the hump of wasteland, nor will he meet the four mysterious inhabitants, nor will he be (as he had hoped) the perpetrator of a seduction (victim: Ogiva). Perhaps even Skiller only has an input-output function: the real computer is elsewhere.
But a game between two computers is not won by the one that plays better than the other, but by the one that understands how its opponent is managing to play better than itself. My computer has now been fed its opponent's winning game: so has it won?
Someone rings at the door. Before going to open it, I must quickly work out how Skiller will react when he finds out his plan has been discovered. I too was persuaded by Skiller to sign a fire insurance policy. Skiller has already provided for killing me and setting fire to the laboratory: he will destroy the punchcards that accuse him and demonstrate that I lost my life attempting arson. I hear the fire brigade's siren approaching: I called them in time. I click off the safety catch on my gun. Now I can open the door.
The Petrol Pump
I should have thought of it before, it's too late now. It's after twelve thirty and I didn't remember to fill up; the service stations will be closed until three. Every year two million tons of crude are brought up from the earth's crust where they have been stored for millions of centuries in the folds of rocks buried between layers of sand and clay. If I set off now there's a danger I'll run out on the way; the gauge has been warning me for quite a while that the tank is in reserve. They have been warning us for quite a while that underground global reserves can't last more than twenty years or so. I had plenty of time to think about it, as usual I've been irresponsible; when the red light begins to wink on the dashboard I don't pay attention, or I put things off, I tell myself there's still the whole reserve to use up, and then I forget about it. No, maybe that's what happened in the past, being careless like that and forgetting about it: in the days when petrol still seemed as plentiful as the air itself. Now when the light comes on it transmits a sense of alarm, of menace, at once vague and impending; that is the message I pick up and record along with the many angst-ridden signs sedimenting down among the folds of my consciousness, dissolving in a state of mind that I can't shake off, but that doesn't prompt me to any precise practical action as a consequence, such as, for example, stopping at the first pump I find and filling up. Or is it an instinct for making savings that has gripped me, a reflex miserliness: as I become aware that my tank is about to run out, so I sense refinery stocks dwindling, and likewise oil pipeline flows, and the loads in tankers ploughing the seas; drill-bits probe the depths of the earth and bring up nothing but dirty water; my foot on the accelerator grows conscious of the fact that its slightest pressure can burn up the last squirts of energy our planet has stored; my attention focuses on sucking up the last dribbles of fuel; I press the pedal as if the tank were a lemon that must be squeezed without wasting a drop; I slow down; no: I accelerate, my instinctive reaction being that the faster I go, the further I'll get with this squeeze, which could be the last.
I don't want to risk leaving town without having filled up. Surely