The Hammer of God by Tom Avitabile Page A

was about. His fear was that once he told anyone, he would probably not want to be on it, or worse, suggest Brodenchy stop drinking. It didn’t take any part of his prodigious brain to figure out that this was not going to be easy. He needed some event or convincer to attract some of the greatest minds in the world onto his panel. That panel would then advise the world on something it would never believe. The more he thought about it, the more he doubted his own sanity.
    Before room service arrived, he reached out to three of the men who he had escaped Hungary with. They would at least give him a straight answer as to whether he was sane or not. Maybe even help him sign up committee members. After a quiet dinner and some very good port, compliments of the U.N., he settled down to a restful night’s sleep.
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    Peter decided it was time to see what RCA could contribute to his cause. Although their computers weren’t as commonplace in 1968 as the big four, they still made them and they had parts. Peter walked towards the big tall letters RCA, seventy stories up from 6th Avenue in Manhattan. This was a huge building. People were taking guided tours of the lobby. It smelled of steam heat and plaster. As he approached the bank of elevators, Peter met his greatest challenge ever: elevator men. These weren’t automated elevators with push buttons; the elevator operators were people who could stop him cold. What to do?
    The building directory was a study in itself. Peter spent twenty minutes looking for the right listing. Then he found it.
    â€œAccounting on the 10th floor,” Peter said to the uniformed elevator operator. Other people were already on and others followed, each calling out their floor. Peter was tall for his age but he prayed no one took a real good look at him, at least not until he was on the computer floor. Then he’d have them, once again, mesmerized by the computer.
    This elevator only served the first ten floors of the building. At three, a few people got off, and one got on and said, “Five please.”
    At four, someone said, “Thank you, Charlie.”
    At five, the doors opened and there it was: the pinching in his nose. He made the instant decision to get off there. As the people left the elevator area, he stayed behind. He walked a little in each direction like a hound dog on a scent. He went left. He found himself walking down long corridors of offices. When the hallway made a sharp right, he followed it. The rug on the floor became a hard vinyl floor. The walls were now blue-ish. The hallways became shorter and made more turns as he kept going. Having turned a corner, he came across a huge glass window behind which was the biggest tape drive he’d ever seen in his life. The tape that it used was wider than the 1/2” tape IBM used, even wider than the 3/4” Honeywell used. He stood in awe with his face up against the glass. There were no vacuum columns, which acted like shock absorbers to fast jerky moves of the tape. That must mean this machine doesn’t have sequential address.
    Two things happened simultaneously. The first was that he noticed a black-and-white monitor on the drive. On it was Dean Martin. It was a surreal experience for Peter. Being in an Italian-American family there were two things you did without question – you went to church every Sunday at ten in the morning and you watched “The Dean Martin Show” every Thursday night at ten. Peter knew the show well enough to know that the guy standing next to Dino was Frank Gorshin, who played the Riddler on “Batman.” It was then Peter knew he was looking into a time machine. Frank Gorshin was going to be the guest star on this Thursday night’s show and here he was watching them at 11:30 in the morning on Tuesday. Wow!
    Then the other thing happened. A hand came down on his shoulder. Accompanied by, “What are you doing here?” in a foreign