6.12: What has the Pod been doing?

Tenbury Wells – ‘TW’ to his friends – has left the Think Tank’s mysterious flying box to try to consult the Pod but has stopped on seeing that several of the minion peas are making their way back to the Pod, having presumably been out and about on their mysterious business. Now he feels too unsettled to continue. 

It is not that he has had any doubts about his derivation of the psycho-historical function that shockingly predicts the demise of the Potting Shed community within a decade. But he had wanted some understanding of how, and the Pod’s direct insight might help him. Unknown to everyone but his three colleagues, his little box, their little flying home, contains the most powerful computer on Earth. They come as standard in mysterious flying boxes, much like 8 track players in top of the range 1970s Ford Granadas. 

But sometimes he likes to have a more general sense of how the calculations work. In this case, it seems that tiny changes to the inputs to the ‘P-H’ field equations make dramatic differences to the output and, while he believes in his own programming, analytic and mathematical abilities, he somehow cannot ‘see’ this. What is going on in the mathematical functions? Perhaps the Pod can somehow offer a more intuitive insight. 

Seeing her minion peas making their way back to their own organic box-like home, he feels uneasy. One of the reasons his little group lives next door to the Potting Shed, like some Nineteenth Century ‘Steppenwolf’ living in the attic of a bourgeois house, is that it is the only truly safe-feeling community he knows of. The Pod, ironically, seems unbound by comfortable convention. Who knows with what machinations its minion peas have been involved?