Whatever: a novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

small man of some sixty years with grey hair and thick glasses. The staff had clubbed together to buy him a fishing rod - a high-performance Japanese model, with three-speed reel and range modifiable by simple finger pressure - but he didn't know that yet. He was staying well in sight beside the bottles of champagne. People were coming up and giving him a friendly pat on the back, even evoking a shared memory.

    Next, the head of the `Computer Studies' department began to speak. It was an impossible task, he announced right away, to summarize in a few words thirty years of a career devoted entirely to agricultural computing. Louis Lindon, he recalled, had known the heroic days of computerization: punched cards! power cuts! magnetic drums! With each exclamation he spread his arms wide, as if bidding those present to cast their minds back to that far-distant time.

    The interested party was smiling with a knowing air, chewing his moustache in a most unpleasant manner. But on the whole he behaved correctly.

    Louis Lindon, the head of department concluded warmly, had put his stamp on agricultural computing. Without him the Ministry of Agriculture computer system would not be what it was today. And that was something none of his present and even future colleagues (his voice became slightly more tremulous) could ever forget.

    There were thirty seconds or so of warm applause. A young girl chosen from among the fairest handed the future pensioner his fishing rod. He brandished it timidly at the end of his arm. This was the signal for heading for the buffet. The head of department went up to Louis Lindon and, putting an arm around his shoulders, slowmarched him away to exchange a few extra tender and heartfelt words.

    This was the moment the theoretician chose to confide to me that, even so, Lindon belonged to another generation of computing. He programmed without real method, partly by intuition; he'd had persistent difficulty adapting to the principles of functional analysis; the concepts of the Merise method had largely passed him by. All the programmes of which he was the author had had to be rewritten, in fact; for the last two years he'd not been given very much to do, he was more or less put out to grass. Lindon's personal qualities, he added warmly, were not at all in question. Things simply change, it's normal.

    Having dispatched Louis Lindon to the mists of time the theoretician could move on to his favourite theme: according to him the production and circulation of information ought to undergo the same mutation that the production and circulation of commodities had known: the transition from the artisanal stage to the industrial stage. In matters of the production of information , he stated acrimoniously, we were still far from zero default : redundancy and imprecision were more often than not the rule. Since they were insufficiently developed, the information distribution networks remained marked by approximation and anachronism (because of this, he angrily pointed out, Telecom was still distributing phone directories on paper!). Thank God the young were clamouring for more and better information; thank God they were showing themselves to be increasingly exigent about response time; but the road that would lead to a perfectly informed, perfectly transparent and communicating society was still long.

    He developed still other ideas; Catherine Lechardoy was at his side. From time to time she acquiesced with a `Yes, that's very important: She had red on her mouth and blue on her eyes. Her skirt reached halfway down her thighs and her tights were black. I suddenly realized that she must buy panties, maybe even g-strings; the hubbub in the room became slightly more animated. I imagined her in Galeries Lafayette choosing a Brazilian tanga in scarlet lace; I felt invaded by an aching sense of compassion.

    At that moment a colleague came up to the theoretician. Turning away from us slightly, each man offered the other a