They were all handicapped by the fact that even the biggest known computer has only a fraction of the capacity and complexity of the human brain. Goldwasser was not. The human brains he was replacing, he discovered as he analysed the newspaper files, suffered from neither capacity nor complexity. Or if they did, they didn’t let it interfere with their work. As if foreseeing the limited intellects of the digital computers which would one day replace them, they had introduced the most drastic simplifications into their work already.

There was no need for Goldwasser to waste the limited stock of storage circuits at his disposal by programming the computer to deal with cortisone, streptomycin, cyclizine, sulphaphenyltrimethylaminodiazine, carbolic acid, and aspirin. ‘Wonder drug’ did for all of them. The need for Kensington, Westminster, Holborn, Paddington, Hammersmith, and Edgware was conveniently satisfied by the one word ‘Mayfair.’ One of the biggest and most heterogeneous ranges of subject was replaced by one of the shortest words; pornography, marriage, indecent exposure, love, sodomy, birth, tenderness, striptease, etc., etc., were all ‘sex.’

On this principle, therefore, it was unnecessary to struggle to programme a computer whose range included writing stories about, say:

A man at Notting Hill Gate who claims to have reduced teenage delinquency by showing lantern slides about development in puberty;

An acquittal for a man accused of indecent exposure in a park at Ealing;

A Gloucester Road man who is unhurt after slipping on a manhole cover outside the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre while Romeo and Juliet is being performed;

An elderly businessman from Maida Vale whose arthritis clears up almost exactly four years after a visit to a strip club.

All the computer had to write was:

MAYFAIR MAN IN SEX SHOW MIRACLE.

There were other simplifications, too, that made Goldwasser’s life easier. A man who manufactured shoe polish, or marketed shoe polish, or appeared in television commercials for shoe polish, or organised a strike against the shoe-polish manufacturers, or ate shoe polish, was simply ‘Mr. Shoe Polish.’ To the computer, Goldwasser realised with a certain wistful pang, he himself, Nobbs, Nunn, and Chiddingfold, were all indifferently ‘Mr. Computer.’ So was the computer. Oil heaters and cigarette ends did not become circumstantially and wordily involved with shavings, waste paper, woodwork, or soft furnishings; fire horror struck. If fire horror struck twice in the same town within the year, They Are Calling It Doom Town. If the fire went on for longer than usual it was a fire marathon; if it was a small fire it was a mini-blaze; if it was in Russia it was a fireski. The world was also full of Mystery Men. Though there was never any mystery about who was behind a crime. It was a Master Mind, which was perhaps why the crime wave was, unlike most of the other waves which Britannia ruled, a permanent one.

Large sections of the English language were also rendered otiose by replacing long words with small words hyphenated together. Unilateralists were ban-the-bomb marchers. Save-the-horses men had a beat-the-rush plan for dodge-the-ban traders. No-overtime men met oh-so-friendly call-off-the-strike officials for let’s-be-sensible talks. On-off-on-off plans for get-you-home services started who-is-to-blame storms.