My
Interpreter
ByK.
anguagcs conic
easily to mc. My
family is from
I the very middle
of Mitteleuropa, where countries arc small
and going out to buy a loaf of bread can
take you across a linguistic frontier. At
home we spoke German and Czech inter
changeably, and when Father wanted to
keep something from the children he
would resort to French—which gave mc a
powerful incentive to learn that language
too. My Uncle Gregor, who was a com
mercial traveler for some years (until an
unfortunate accident confined him to his
room), talked with shopkeepers in seven
languages, including Turkish. I myself,
though no scholar, mastered the classical
languages and Russian before I left the
"gymnasium, and in the years since, of
course, I've added English.
It was only natural, then, when I found

myself in a strange land and in need of a
livelihood, that I turned to translation. At
first I worked for a New York bank, han
dling correspondence with the Frankfurt
office. It was a dull job, and neither well
paid nor well respected. (The boss was
continually saying Bitte and Danke to mc,
which I found insufferable; he knew not
another word of German.) What I really
wanted was to do simultaneous trans
lation, as I had heard it done on lunchtime
visits to the United Nations.
About a year ago the international
department of the bank was reorganized,
and I was left without a job. I made in
quiries at the U.N., but I lacked credentials.
And so it happened, one spring day, that I
answered the following newspaper ad:
INTERPRETER
Fast, experienced. High-tech
assignment. Enter the exciting
world of computers. 32K.

The woman at the employment agency
gave my resume a cursory look and asked
a few questions. Curiously, we talked
mainly about Polish and about something
she called Reverse Polish, which I gath
ered was a sort of backwards jargon, like
pig Latin. I told her plainly that I could
speak no Polish either backwards or for
wards, but it made no difference; all of
Central Europe was of a piece to her. At
the end of our brief interview she said I
could have the job, and she scribbled
the address on a slip of paper. It was a
remarkable address, being made up of
nothing but numerals. What the numbers
meant, I eventually decided, was 1100
110th Street, 11101-1011.
Tracking down my new employer took
me into an area of the city I had never vis
ited before. The cab driver, a Ukrainian
emigre, assured mc he could find the
place: it was out on the island, he said,
beyond the airports, in one of the new
industrial "parks." And indeed as we
drove on through the twilight we entered
what looked to be a factory district. The
glass spires of Manhattan had been left
behind; here the buildings were low, flat-

"**//!„

•^3*

roofed, windowless and uniformly recti
linear. Yet they were not entirely without
ornament. On the two long faces of each
building was a colonnade made up of a
dozen or more pillars set close to the wall.
In stilted English my driver told me the
story of his life. (I concealed my knowl
edge of Russian lest I hear it in even
greater detail.) At one point he inter
rupted himself to say, "It is old joke about
America: The streets are paved with
gold." When I looked out the window, I
saw what he meant. We were on a park
way, which wound among the factory
buildings and occasionally even passed
under them. I counted 16 parallel lanes,
separated from one another by narrow
grass median strips. And yes, the road
ways did have a metallic gleam, although
the color was more coppery than golden.
The building where the taxi left me was
one of the larger examples of the new
industrial architecture, with a 20-column
colonnade front and back. Inside it
seemed bigger still. The entire space was
filled with brightly painted machinery.
One section had thousands of small
machines, all alike—they looked like
parking meters or gumball dispenserslaid out in columns and rows as in a per
fectly planted orchard. Elsewhere the
apparatus was arranged in banks that
appeared to work in unison; I supposed
they must be stamping out multiple copies
of the same part. Near the middle of the
plant I could see a control panel with hun
dreds of dials, levers, switches and col
ored lights. And toward the four walls
were a number of cleared areas that
looked like helicopter landing pads; I took
them to be loading docks.
In truth the place was not unpleasant in
the ways I would have expected of a fac
tory. There was no noise, no clangor of
metal meeting metal, but only a continual
whoosh in the background, like the sound
of a radio tuned between stations. And
there was no soot or grime; on the con
trary, the room was exceptionally clean
and bright—even cheering in a gaudy

28 COMPUTERLANGUAGE !APRIL1986

way. But why had they sent for me? What
need could they have here for a translator?
A guard examined the address written
on my slip of paper and conducted me to a
glass-walled office overlooking the fac
tory floor. The legend in gold leaf on the
door panel read "Operating System
Supervisor." Inside, a woman in a tweed
suit gave me a brisk handshake. "You're
the new interpreter?" she said. "I'm Ms.
Dos. I wish we had time to get properly
acquainted, but I'm afraid we're going to
have to put you to work straightaway. He's
waiting."
I followed her down an open stairway
onto a metal catwalk suspended 20 feet
above the factory floor. It was narrow
enough that we had to go single file, and
so she spoke to me by half turning around
as she walked. "It's a good thing you
showed up when you did," she said. "I
don't know what I would have done. We
just lost our last interpreter. Clobbered by
a bug." She must have noticed a flicker of
alarm in my face. "I know it's unsettling
to be brought in under these circum
stances. But, as you doubtless know better
than I, it's an occupational hazard."
We were beyond the gumball orchard
and somewhere to the right of the control
panel when Ms. Dos took a sudden turn
into an unmarked byway and then
descended a ladder to the polished floor
below. I followed, gingerly. "Here we
are," she said, with a sweep of the arm.
"Now I realize you're fluent in several
languages, but I don't think you've ever
worked with a threaded one before, have
you?"
"Pardon me?"
"Never mind. I'll run through the
whole routine anyway, just to be on the
safe side. There's not much to it, really;
you just have to keep track of a couple lev
els of indirection, and of course be sure
you don't forget anything. The Outer
Interpreter, you know, is the heart of this
operation. We're all depending on you.
"OK, so the tokens come down this
chute here, one at a time. The moment a
token arrives, you take it, you read the
word on it, and then you look up the word
in the dictionary. We keep the dictionaries
over here." She riffled the pages of a great
folio volume mounted on a lectern.

"Sometimes you may have to search more
than one dictionary, but I'll come back to
that.
"Anyway, let's assume you find the
word. Now there's quite a lot of informa
tion in a typical dictionary entry, but most
of it need not concern you. And to make
the job more manageable we've colorcoded the dictionary entries. It's red for
constants, yellow for variables and blue
for colon definitions. So you take one of
these slips in the color that matches the
entry, and you read down through the
definition until you come to what we call
the PFA, the parameter-field address. You
write the PFA on the slip, then you come
over here and put it in a capsule of the
same color. Finally you drop the capsule
into the tube that matches its color. All
you have to do is keep your colors
straight."
"Where do the tubes go?"
"The red and the yellow ones go to the
stack supervisor, who has his boys push a
value onto the stack. The blue one is a
direct line to Mr. Next. He takes care of
everything else. Any other questions
before we go on?"
"Surely," I said, "it's not necessary to
look up every word in the dictionary." I
was miffed that she would take me for that
kind of translator.
"How else would you find the PFA?"
"Well, suppose I already know what
the words mean."
She looked at me in sudden confusion.
"What they mean? How could you possi
bly know that? /don't know what they
mean. Even Mr. Next doesn't know. No
one knows what the words mean—unless,
I guess, He knows."
"He?"
"Well I always think of Him as He,
although it could just as well be She. You
know. Up there. Beyond the glass."
I nodded assent, the way one does with
people who are obviously mad. Ms. Dos
had evidently developed similar sus
picions about me, and she continued her
lecture in a tone appropriate to a child or
an idiot. "Now there will be times when
you don't find a word in the dictionary.

What you do then is you take the token
itself and you put it in this slot, which
goes downstairs to the numbers depart
ment. Ninety-nine percent of the time
that's all there is to it; the counting house
will take care of it. But, and this is very
important, if you should get a token that
isn't a dictionary entry and isn't a number,
that means we have a bug. What you do
then is pull the alarm and get out of here.
Quick." She showed me the alarm, a red
box near the ladder. Cast into the metal
were the instructions: "Break Glass. Pull
Lever."
"There's just one more thing you have
to do after processing each token. Before
the next token comes down the chute, you
go around the corner here and you check
the stack." She showed me. It was a stack
of cafeteria trays, spring-loaded to
keep the top tray level with the counter.
There was no telling how deep it might be.
"That stack should never be completely
empty. There's a bottom tray on it like the
last $20 bill in the cash register, that you
never take out unless you're being robbed.
Anyway, if the stack is empty that means
we've got a different kind of bug, and you
pull the alarm box over here."
The talk of bugs unnerved me. I have a
morbid fear of insects and spiders, and
although I know it's irrational, that makes
it no less real. I come by it honestly, any
way: my mother was far worse. When she
found a cutworm on the lettuce or—God
forbid!—a cockroach on the kitchen floor,
she would freeze. She couldn't kill it; she
couldn't run; she couldn't even scream.
This phobia of hers had something to do
with her brother—my Uncle Gregor—but
I never learned exactly what. Whenever I
asked her, she just shivered.

I could have walked out that first day. I
could have said to Ms. Dos, "No thank
you, this is not the job for me. I am a pro
fessional translator; I know a word from a
number without looking in a dictionary."
The main reason I stayed, thinking it

would be only for a day or two, is that I
was intrigued. When I left home for
Amerika (my other uncle, Franz, always
spelled it that way), I was told I would see
wonders. I was told they had a machine in
Amerika for everything—one to wash the
clothes, another to beat an egg, a third to
brush your teeth. But no one at home
could have guessed that I would find
myself operating the machinery of a vast
language factory, where words and num
bers tumbled down chutes, got sucked
into pneumatic tubes and were pushed into
coin slots. If this is how an interpreter
worked in the New World, I thought I had
better find out about it.
Moreover, the job gave me a chance to
add another language to my repertory, and
what an odd language it turned out to be. I
couldn't identify it, but I knew it was not
Polish. Many of the "words" inscribed on
the tokens were not words at all but mere
marks of punctuation—a period, a colon,
an exclamation point, and so on. The dic
tionary was equally strange. It was not
organized alphabetically. Instead, you
looked up a word by starting at the back of
the book and checking the last entry; if it
didn't match the word you were looking
for, it would tell you the page and line
number of the next entry to be checked.
You worked all the way through the dic
tionary by following this trail of
cross-references.
The words themselves were baffling.
At first I thought Ms. Dos must be right:
they were completely senseless. One frag
ment I remember from those early days
said, FLUSH OVER OVER HERE! When I

would see such demented ranting, I would
get the giggles. Later, though, phrases
began to tantalize me with glimmers of
meaning. A series of tokens would come
down the chute, saying, DUP = IF ROT
ELSE DROP THEN. This was a dark say
ing but not totally opaque. Apparently
someone was either going to rot or going
to drop—but who? A dupe?
For some weeks my own tasks seemed
as arbitrary and meaningless as the words
I was looking up. The PFAs were mere
numbers that had no obvious connection
with the words they supposedly defined.
My position near the stack and the dictio
nary, however, turned out to be a good
observation post, and in time patterns
began to emerge. I noticed that whenever
I sent a message through the red or the
yellow tube, the stack handlers would
come and put an extra tray on the heap.
Similarly, when I passed the PFA for DUP
through the tube to the mysterious Mr.
Next, the stack boys would make a copy
of the top tray and add it to the stack.
When I processed a DROP token, the top
tray would be discarded.
Other words had effects of more direct
consequence to me. When I came upon a
colon in the stream of tokens, a clerk from
the next room would shortly appear and
begin adding definitions to the dictionary.
The word FORGET brought the clerk back
to rip out entire pages. (The first time this
happened I tried to stop him—I was sure
one of us would get in trouble—but he
assured me it was all part of the job.) Fol-

29

lowing the word DEFINITIONS, a clerk
would set up another lectern for a new
dictionary.
It was not hard work. The tokens—
bright brass coins that not only looked
like subway tokens but in fact worked per
fectly well in the turnstiles—arrived at a
steady pace. I would go through my ritual
of consulting the dictionary, shooting a
message off to Mr. Next or whoever and
checking the stack, and when I got back
the next token would just then be rattling
down the chute. There was an clement of
tedium to it all, particularly in the con
stant references to the dictionary, but it
was the kind of work one can do with half
a mind, while simultaneously planning
dinner or composing a letter home.
The one relief from the routine was the
bug alarm. The first time I had to pull the
switch I was frightened, not least because
I almost missed my cue. I had looked up a
word and been unable to find it, which
happened fairly often, and so I had
dropped the token in the numbers slot.
This time, however, I did not hear the
usual clanks, clunks and ratcheting noises
as the token worked its way through the
machinery; instead, it merely reappeared
in the reject bin below the slot. I very
nearly did what one always does when a
balky vending machine won't take your
quarter: try it again. I had the token in my
hand when I remembered. I looked
around warily for signs of six-legged life,
but the floor was spotless. All the same, I
lunged for the alarm box and smashed the
glass with the little red hammer that hung
on a chain.
At the top of the ladder I found the cat
walks filled with milling workers. A siren
was whooping but no one had panicked or
even seemed to be in much of a hurry.
There was no question of shoving through
the crowds on those narrow walkways,
and so I shuffled along with the rest,
toward one of the loading docks and then
into the open air. After 10 minutes or so
the all-clear sounded and we filed back in.
I learned soon enough that bug alarms
were not the rare emergencies I had sup
posed they would be. We had at least two
or three a day, and sometimes they came

3 0 COMPUTERLANGUAGE !APRIL1986

in such quick succession we barely had
time to get back to work before the next
one sounded. Most of the employees took
them rather like school fire drills—as an
officially sanctioned occasion for goofing
off.
It was during the bug drills that I first
met some of my coworkers: the stack
boys, who were a good-hearted roughhouse gang, the clerks from the lexi
cography department, who were con
stantly in and out of my office revising the
dictionaries, the text readers who worked
directly over my head, and the accoun
tants from the numbers department, one
floor down.
In brief conversations outside the gates
I picked up a good deal about the oper
ation of the plant. The stack boys told mc,
with more relish than tact, about the fate
of my predecessor. It seems the Outer
Interpreter's routine checks on the stack
can detect one possible malfunction,
called a stack underflow. The opposite
problem of stack overflow cannot be
caught until it's too late. The last Outer
Interpreter had been trapped in his room
by a particularly sudden and massive
overflow and crushed under tons of caf
eteria trays. I resolved to keep a closer eye
on the stack.
The countinghouse crew I could never
warm up to. On their breaks they stood
around playing some numerical parlor
game. (It was something like hangman,
but instead of guessing the letters of a
word, you guessed the prime factors of a
large number.) The text readers were
more congenial company. It was they who
supplied the tokens that tumbled down my
chute. Their job was to scan an incoming
stream of text and break it up into individ
ual words, throwing out the intervening
spaces and stamping each word onto a
brass blank. I asked where the text came
from in the first place. "From Him."
Such passing references led me to some
tentative conclusions about Him. Evi
dently I had stumbled onto a small
religious cult. Virtually everyone in the
plant believed (and the text readers
believed with much fervor) that some
where above was a powerful unseen being
who was the author of all words. He wrote
them in green fire on the glass lid of the
sky. Our lot, here below, was to do His

bidding not from fear of punishment or
for hope of reward but simply because
there was no alternative. I have little
patience with a doctrine that leaves so lit
tle room for free will, but this religion at
least had a measure of humor. The deity of
the cult was omnipotent but not infallible;
indeed He was presented as something of
a chronic blunderer, always sending us on
errands that were bound to come a crop
per. As one of the readers put it, He is the
source of all words and of all bugs.
I heard rather more about Him than I
cared to know, but inquiries about the
enigmatic Mr. Next got me nowhere.
None of my colleagues admitted to know
ing him. There was another mystery on
my mind as well. If I was the Outer Inter
preter, there simply had to be an Inner
Interpreter. I knew I would not fully grasp
this new language until I had found him.

I had been on the job six months when I
began taking shortcuts. It was not laziness
that led me to this; on the contrary, I felt I
was making a natural and obvious
improvement in my own efficiency. By
then I had long since memorized the PFAs
of all the commoner words. (How could I
help learning them, when DUP, SWAP,
ROT, DROP and the like came by me a
hundred times a day?) It seemed idiotic to
continue going through the rigmarole of a
dictionary search for every word. The
searches were made all the more onerous
by the fact that most of the common little
words were defined near the front of the
book, so that I had to follow a long trail of
word-to-word links to get to them.
As a first step I dispensed with follow
ing the chain of cross-references. I just
flipped directly to the page where I knew
the definition would be found. Soon I
dropped even this pretense of following
the rules. If a colon or an exclamation
point came down the chute, I already
knew the PFA, and so I just wrote it on a
blue slip and shipped it off to Mr. Next.
There were still unfamiliar words I had to

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look up—indeed, brand new ones were
appearing all the time—but I was soon
translating more than half of the tokens
without cracking the books.
I started applying common sense to
numbers too. They had been a major irri
tation. I would get a token that said "137,"
and although I knew perfectly well it was
not in the dictionary, I had to check every
word on the list before I could dump the
token in the slot. On most days He sent
down a great many numbers, and I grew
thoroughly sick of these long and fruitless
searches. Hence I began culling the num
bers out by hand and passing them on
directly. Some care was needed in this.
For example, " + 1" was a number meant
for the coin slot, but "1 + " was a "word"
with a PFA that had to go to Mr. Next.
My colleagues were not happy with my
new work habits. As far as I know, they
never learned how I was doing it, but they
couldn't help noticing a terrific increase
in the pace. Most of my time had been
spent leafing through the pages of that
blasted book. With the bottleneck
removed, the lexicographers, the stack
boys and even the text readers were being
deprived of their leisure. Over a cup of
coffee it was hinted, with a broad, embar
rassed smile, that I should take it easy.
When I didn't comply, the suggestions
became more emphatic. People stopped
talking to me although not about me. The
possibility of a union grievance was
mentioned.
Apart from disgruntlement, however,
my new methods had no ill effects. I was
enjoying my work for the first time; what
I was doing now was less mechanical and
closer to the real art of translation.
Besides, I was sure my improved perfor
mance would be noticed by those in
charge, who might therefore view me as a
candidate for promotion, ideally for a
move "inward."
As the weeks passed I grew more con
fident. I began calling bug alerts on my
own authority. A token would come down

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CIRCLE 36 ON READER SERVICE CARD

with some bit of nonsense stamped on it,
which I knew immediately was neither
word nor number. Rather than waste my
time with the dictionary or the numbers
slot, I just broke the glass and headed
for the door.
Finally I began making silent cor
rections. One day the word DORP came
across my desk. There was no point in
looking it up or trying to pass it off as a
number, and I was tired of fire drills. I
knew well enough what He meant, and so
I did Him a favor. I put through the PFA
for DROP.
I still don't know how I slipped up. For
some days I had suspected them of testing
me. The same sequence of words kept
coming through over and over, sometimes
with small variations. As soon as I caught
on, I made a special effort to be consis
tent, to treat each word the same way
every time, to make the same emen
dations, to pull the alarm in response to
the same errors. It was like trying to sus
tain a complicated lie under prolonged
interrogation. I may have gotten confused
at a critical moment. It's also possible
someone inside betrayed me.
I was alert to danger. I kept a wary eye
on the stack and on the stack boys, who
had become openly surly. But the ending
they had planned for mc was subtler than
that.
Early in the day there was a long series
of undisguised test words. I knew what He
was up to. Several times He added a set of
terms to the dictionary, then issued a FOR
GET to delete some of them. I had to keep
track of which words were defined and
which had been forgotten at any given
instant.
About lunchtimc there was a pause,
then a few more words tumbled in, at a
slower rate than usual. There was some
business about moving a fence; when that
had been accomplished, another FORGET
arrived. The word that followed was one I
had not seen before: INTERPRET I held
the token in my hand, I went to the dictio
nary, I followed the chain of references
for page after page. Finally, about half
way to the front, I found it. Coming upon
that word in the dictionary was like seeing
my own name in the telephone book.
There's something grand about such pub
lic testimony to your own existence, but it
can also make you queasy. If you're in the
book, anyone can get to you. And a word,
a name, is so easy to blot out.
At that moment I knew I was finished. I
was to be the instrument of my own exe
cution. I was to write down my own PFA
on a blue slip and stuff it down the blue
tube. In a matter of seconds the lexi
cographers would appear and methodi
cally rip me out of the dictionary.

The guards caught up with me in the
open bay by one of the loading docks.
They marched me off to another glasswalled room, where the sign on the door
read: "Office of the Inner Interpreter." A
blue tube entered through the back wall
and descended in a smooth arc to a bin by
the desk.
Mr. Next and I had a long talk. He told
me about his own career with the com
pany and tried to explain the duties of his
office. From the description he gave mc, I
might have guessed he was in charge of
the mailroom: it was all about current
addresses, forwarding addresses and
return addresses. He worked with the list
of numbers that made up the bulk of each
dictionary definition, the part I had had no
cause to read. The numbers, he said, were
addresses of still more words. His job had
two parts. First he found the next address
in the list, the one following the PFA we
were working on currently. He saved this
forwarding address and gave the current
address to his executive assistant. When
the assistant came back, Mr. Next would
take out the saved forwarding address and
treat it as a new current address. He
would read one more number down the
list, getting another forwarding address to
save, pass the old saved address to the
assistant, and so on. The process con
tinued until he came to the end of a
definition.
There was more. Mr. Next and his staff
kept their own stack, similar to mine but
holding only return addresses. Some
times, he said, platters were transferred
between his stack and mine, although I
had never been aware of it. I was able to
follow this description only in the foggiest
way. Much of it failed to register simply
because I didn't see the point of it all. The
troubling thing is. I don't think Mr. Next
did cither. In some ways he had even less
understanding than I did of the language
we were supposed to be interpreting. He
could not tell me the meaning of one
word.
Eventually it came time to discuss my
own troubled circumstances. Like figures
of authority everywhere, from fathers to
principals to presidents, Mr. Next was
more hurt than angry, more disappointed
than vengeful. "You showed great prom
ise, great potential. K. We all had the
highest expectations. From the moment
you arrived you were quick, accurate,
conscientious . . . ." He made spider
motions with his hands as he talked. "One

day you might very well have found your
self in this office, behind this desk."
1 knew well enough what this tone
implied. I wasn't sorry to be leaving. As a
matter of fact, it seemed to me a great dis
pensation: I would never again have to
DUP. DROP or ROT. I put up a fight only
out of a sense of fairness. "I think I
deserve some recognition for what I've
accomplished here," I said. "The effi
ciency of this plant must be up tenfold.
You might weigh that in the balance along
with my mistakes, whatever they were. At
the very least I deserve a good
recommendation."
Mr. Next made the saddest eyes. "I
wish I could do that for you, K. Or I wish

you could understand why I can't do it.
It's not just a matter of mistakes: you did
make a few, but we could forgive them
and work with you to correct them. No.
it's something more fundamental. The
truth is. K. — there's no hiding it—you
have become a bug."
"K." is a pseudonym of (among others)
Brian Hayes, a Minneapolis writer
who sometimes dreams of becoming an
Inner Interpreter.

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