The House of Doors - 01 Read Online Free PDF Page A

a deficiency by introducing a supplementary talent. People who are blind from birth or soon after can often ‘see’ as well as you and I. Musicians as deaf as posts compose masterpieces—without ever being able to hear them! Do you know what I mean?”
    Turnbull frowned. “I think so. And you think nature knew she’d played a dirty trick on you, so gave you this thing of yours to balance the scales. But what good is it to you? It strikes me the scales remain pretty much out of kilter. I mean what the hell good is this talent of yours—this rapport with mechanical things—if it doesn’t solve your problems?”
    “It’s been a lot of use to other people.” Gill defended his “talent.” “I check out faulty jet engines. I have a knack of programming computers to crack security codes—Eastern Bloc codes, that is. I can look at a piece of Russian equipment and say how it was made and, if it’s any good, the easiest way to duplicate it. I’ve just helped Elecorps reduce their microchip to micromicro, and working with Solinc we developed a solar energy panel thirty-five percent more efficient than the next best. No, it hasn’t helped me much, not personally—not if you discount the money. I’m not short of money, believe me! But even without the financial side, I’m still a sight better off than that kid in Cyprus.”
    “Cyprus? Your father was in the army, wasn’t he? He served there?”
    Gill nodded. “I was just a kid,” he said. “I schooled in Dhekelia, a British sovereign base. I was lousy at sums. One day out shopping in Larnaca, my father showed me a local kid standing on a street corner. ‘Son,’ my father said, ‘stop worrying about your sums. Some people have it and some don’t. You see that Greek Cypriot kid? He has it. But he’s also a cripple, with one leg four inches shorter than the other, and he stammers like a machine gun.’
    “I asked what it was that the kid had and my father showed me. He wrote down a three-figure number and multiplied it by itself twice. Like two times two times two equals eight, but using three figures instead of just one. We went to the Greek kid and my father told him the first number and asked him to cube it—but in his head. Mental arithmetic! The kid said the number twice to himself, scratched his head, then took my father’s pencil and wrote down the answer. The one-hundred-percent-correct answer. Now tell me: what good was his talent to him, eh? On a street corner in a fishing village?”
    Turnbull had to agree. “Not much.”
    “Then there were the so-called ‘Rubik Twins’ just nine or ten years ago. A Manchester father bought his twin sons a cube. No matter how complicated he’d mix up the squares, his sons would solve it in seconds flat. Let him totally sod up the combinations, still they’d unscramble the thing. Each son was as good as the other. So the father complained to the makers that he’d been ripped off; their cube was too easy. They came to see these prodigies for themselves, concluded that the twins were naturals at it—as simple as that. Word got out and other kids turned up who were almost as good. But the beauty of the twins was this: they invariably solved the thing in the least possible number of moves!
    “The media explanation: ‘their minds work in three dimensions!’ My personal response to that: crap! That’s as bad as saying I talk to machines. All of our minds work in three dimensions! We live in three dimensions! But the fact is that multidimensional or otherwise, their minds did work differently. And so does mine.”
    “What about computers?” Turnbull was insatiable. “That’s where you really shine, isn’t it? You can hear them thinking.”
    The look he got then told him he was wrong. “No.” Gill sighed again and shook his head. “I can’t because they don’t. They solve problems but they don’t think. They can only give out what’s first put in. Oh, they can extrapolate, if they’re asked to—and