The Hammer of God by Tom Avitabile

supplies, and coveted circuit boards – with the gold contacts still on them! Sol and the boys at Vesey Street would have given him the whole store for one of these, just for the gold. This new paternal group offered him a summer job, but more than he could ever imagine was about to come.
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    Meanwhile, at the UN meeting, Dr. Brodenchy was about to walk out of the room. He was sure that the Undersecretary General of the U.N. for Economic and Social Affairs must have been drinking. Otherwise, he was insane. Either way Brodenchy didn’t want any part of it.
    Sensing the impossible position he was in, the undersecretary took the chance of his career. “What if I show you proof?”
    That stopped Brodenchy. Now this bureaucrat was either pulling a prank or had misinterpreted something as “proof” of the outlandish claims he just made. His intellectual interest piqued, Brodenchy acceded.
    â€œMay I ask you to wait here while I make the necessary preparations?” the undersecretary said.
    â€œCertainly,” Brodenchy said. He took a seat in the outer office. His mind raced with the implications to mankind if what he had just heard was true. Why had he never heard anything about this before? Furthermore, if it were a fact, why did they want him involved?
    â€œDoctor, the Secretary will see us now.”
    â€œThe Secretary?” Brodenchy asked.
    â€œThe Secretary General of the United Nations, U Thant.”
    A chill went through Brodenchy. U Thant was a world-respected figure. If he was buying into this nonsense, maybe there was something…

Chapter Four
    FOLLOWING YOUR NOSE
    Peter had hit the mother lode. It was like taking candy from big babies. All he had to do was violate the sanctity of some computer room and within minutes he had them right in the palm of his hand. Peter was now firmly committed to his goal of actually building an older IBM 1401 computer from all the parts they threw at him. He’d have to talk his uncle Joe into giving him space in his garage. A 1401, even just the boards, was a big machine, too big for the three-room apartment in the two family house he, his parents, and brother now lived in.
    Peter remembered the pinch in his nose that the computer room caused. It became the basis of his plan of attack. He’d go into a midtown skyscraper, press all the buttons on the elevator and at every floor, sniff the air. The clue Peter was sniffing for was the smell of acetate. It was the base layer of the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing’s magnetic tape that was unceasingly run at high speed past the heads on the big computer tape drives of the day. The odor was unmistakable, a little like vinegar, and a little like old galoshes. 3M used it because when they broke, acetate based tapes broke clean with no stretching, meaning they could be repaired by a simple splice of tape with no loss of data.
    In the Pan Am building, Peter sniffed his way to two IBM 360 – 40s in one room. He walked off with a power supply compliments of an enamored computer engineer. At Lever House (IBM 360 –30) he got manuals and two register motherboards. Even at just a plain white building on 51st and Park, he smelled out an IBM 360-30 at a brokerage house and got to make up punch cards with his name on them. He had the idea to type in the alphabet and numbers 0-9 and get the whole alphanumeric card code right there in his hands. The largess from his little forays into corporate America was filling up his room in the Bronx – he’d better talk to Uncle Joe soon!
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    Brodenchy left the U.N. in a daze and checked in to a room at the Waldorf. He ordered room service and sat trying to figure out how to accomplish the outrageous mission he had just accepted. He had agreed to chair a committee that at this point had no one on it. The conundrum he faced was that someone had to be on the committee before he could tell that person what the committee