1Now hear of a woman who kept a book of numbers, and of a child who would not wake.
2There is a great house of learning where the land of the Swiss meets the land of the French, under a wall of mountains. A ring is dug beneath its fields, so long that to walk round it would take most of a day. In that ring they drive the smallest pieces of the world against one another, to see what they are made of. People come there in thousands from every country. They stay a season, or ten years, and go home.
3Odile Favre kept the book of their telephones. She had kept it for nineteen years. She knew a thing the wise ones often forgot. In a house where everyone is always arriving and leaving, the hardest thing to find is each other.
4It was hard for another reason too. Each band of scholars brought its own reckoning machines, and each kind of machine kept its writings in its own fashion and would not read another's. People left, and what they knew left with them. Odile's own book lived in the great machine in the cellar, and to look up one number a man had first to learn that machine's whole way of speaking. Most of them telephoned her instead.
5Now there worked in that house an Englishman named Tim Berners-Lee, a builder of the programs that reckoning machines run by. In the year the wall came down, he wrote out a plan and gave it to his chief. The plan was for a way to tie writings together across all the machines. Any page could point to any other, wherever it lay. A reader need only touch the pointing word, and the other page would come.
6His chief was a man named Mike Sendall. He read the plan and wrote three words across the top of it: "Vague, but exciting." Then he did the thing that mattered. He let the Englishman go on.
7By the end of the next year it was built. It ran on one machine, a black cube on a desk, in a room off a long corridor. Odile passed that room each morning. One day she saw that a label had been stuck to the front of the cube, written by hand. It said: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"
8She asked a young man of her office, whose name was Rémy, what a server was.
9"It serves the pages," he said. "If someone in Hamburg asks for a page, that box hands it over. If the box is off, there is no page."
10"And how many such boxes are there?"
11"In the world? That one."
12Odile looked through the door at it. A small green light burned on its face. "So the whole of this web is one lamp," she said, "and a note asking the cleaners not to blow it out."
13"For now," said Rémy.
14The first thing of any use that was put upon the web was Odile's book. Those who were building the web needed something that people would want every day, and what people in that house wanted every day was a telephone number. So the book was made to open through the web, from any machine in the house. Within the year half the house was using the web without caring what it was. They thought it was a telephone book.
15So did Odile. "It is a clever index," she told Rémy.
16"No. Listen. Your book is in the cellar. Fine. But a page here can point to a page in Hamburg, and that page to one in California, and nobody in between has to agree to it. There is no middle. Nobody keeps the gate. If one page dies, the rest stand."
17"And who is in charge of it?"
18"Nobody."
19"Then it will not last," said Odile, who had worked in an office for nineteen years.
20It nearly did not. Hear how.
21The web was not the only such thing in those years. There was another, made at a school in the cold north of America and named for a small digging animal. It was simpler, and many liked it better, and it grew faster than the web. Then one spring that school let it be known that some who used its program would have to pay.
22It was not a wicked thing to ask. The school had spent money and wanted some of it back. But all over the world, people who had been building on that ground put down their tools. And they turned and looked at the web, and asked: who owns this one? When will its bill come?
23Nobody could tell them. The web had been made in the house under the mountains, on the house's wages. By every custom it was the house's to sell.
24Rémy said they would be fools not to. "Do you know what the ring costs? They go begging to twenty governments every year. Here is the one thing we have ever made that an ordinary person could want. Put a small price on it. One coin a page."
25"Then there would be a gate," said Odile slowly, "and someone to keep it." "You told me there was no middle. If there is a price, there is a middle. Someone must stand there and count."
2627 The Englishman did not want it sold. That much is known, for he and a Belgian who worked beside him, Robert Cailliau, pressed the house for many months to give the web away whole. What was said in those rooms I do not know, and I will not make it up. I know what came out of them.
27On the last day of the fourth month of that year, the house under the mountains put its name to a paper. The paper said that the web was given to everyone: the means of serving pages, the means of reading them, and all the workings. Anyone might use it, copy it, change it and build upon it. No fee would be asked. The house gave up its claim.
28Odile read a copy pinned to the board by the dining hall, beside a notice about a choir. Nobody else stopped. She read it twice.
29"They have given away the only thing they could have sold," said Rémy at her shoulder.
30"Yes." She was still looking at it. "I wonder if they know what it is."
31"Do you?"
32"No," said Odile. "It is a telephone book."
33When that paper was signed there were some fifty such boxes in the world. By the end of the year there were hundreds. A year after that there were ten thousand. No one had needed to ask leave.
34The Englishman left the house the next year. He crossed the sea to the school of engineers on the river, and there he gathered a council to keep the rules of the web open and the same for all. He took out no patent on it. He asked no rent.
35Now the child.
36Odile had a daughter, Claire, married to a joiner in a village high in the Jura, an hour's drive up from the house. In the third winter after the paper, Claire's son Luc was seven months old.
37He was a fine fat child. That winter he began to sleep the whole night through, and Claire was glad of it. Then one morning in the first month of the year she went to lift him, and he would not wake.
38He was breathing. He was warm. But he hung in her hands like a wet cloth, and when she raised his eyelids he looked at nothing. They drove down the mountain with him. At the hospital in the town they put a needle in his arm and ran sugared water into him, and within the hour he was awake and roaring for milk. The doctors kept him two days and found nothing wrong. Some chill, they said.
39Five weeks later he had a cold in the head and would not eat his supper. In the morning he would not wake. This time it was worse. He shook, and his lips were grey. Again the needle, and the sugared water. Again by evening he was himself. Again they found nothing.
40The village doctor was an old man named Perrin, and he was honest. "Madame," he said to Claire, "I have been forty years in these hills and I have not seen this. I do not know what it is. I am writing to the city. It may be a month before anyone answers." "I do not like to wait a month."
41Odile heard all this on the telephone, at her desk, on a Friday in the short days. The telephone book was on the glass in front of her, as it had been for five years.
42She thought: there is no middle.
43By then there were machines on the web whose whole work was finding. You gave them words, and they gave you every page that held those words. She had never had cause to use one. She typed, in her careful English, what she knew. Baby. Will not wake in morning. After not eating. Sugar.
44A great many pages came, and most were nothing. She did what she had done with numbers for twenty-five years. She went down the list in order and did not skip.
45The nineteenth was a plain grey page with no picture on it. It had been written by a woman in a town in the middle of America. It began: Our daughter Hannah was eight months old the first morning we could not wake her.
46Odile read it with her hand over her mouth. It was all there. The long night's sleep. The cold in the head, the missed supper. The limpness, and the sugar that brought her back, and the doctors who found nothing, twice. And then a name, a long one, for a rare fault that some children are born with. Such a child cannot burn its own fat when the food runs out. Fed, it is well. Left too long unfed, asleep or sick, it fails; and some have died of it in their cots, and no one ever learned why.
47The page named the test that would show it. And it gave the rule, in large letters. Never let them go long without food. Wake them and feed them in the night. When they are sick and will not eat, give sugar at once, and go to the hospital.
48At the bottom the woman had written: When it happened to us there was nothing to read. So I have put this here.
49Odile set the page to print. Then she telephoned her daughter.
50"Has he eaten?"
51"He has a little fever. He took nothing at supper. Maman, I have only just got him down, don't —"
52"Wake him."
53"What?"
54"Wake him now, Claire. Feed him. If he will not take milk, then sugar in water, on a spoon, a little and a little. I am coming. I will tell you why when I am there. Go and wake him while I am on the telephone. I want to hear him."
55There was a long quiet, with footsteps in it. Odile held the telephone with both hands. Then, far off in the house on the mountain, came a thin, slow, angry cry.
5658 She drove up in the dark, through blowing snow. They fed the child by turns through the night, every three hours by the kitchen clock. In the morning he woke by himself and laughed at the cat.
57On the Monday she and Claire carried him, and the printed page, down to the great hospital in the city by the lake. The doctor who saw them was a young woman with tired eyes. Odile did not say, the machine told me. She said, "A mother in America wrote down what happened to her child. It is what happened to ours. I do not know if she is right. Here is the test she names."
58The doctor read the page through, both sides. "A page by a mother is not medicine," she said. "It may be wrong. Anyone can write anything there, madame. That is the trouble with it." She put her finger on the long name. "But this is a real thing. I have read of it and never seen it. And it is a question I can answer by Thursday."
59It was answered by Thursday, and the answer was yes.
60There is no cure for that fault. There is only the rule. Luc was fed in the night until he was four, and given sugar when he was sick, and he grew up tall in the Jura with no memory of any of it.
61Odile wrote to the woman in America, across the web, in a letter that took less than a breath to cross the sea. She did not know what to put. In the end she wrote: Your page reached a village in the mountains of France. A boy is awake here because of it.
62An answer came the next morning. It was one line. Then please write it down in French.
63There was nothing on the web about that fault in French. Odile had looked. So she wrote it. It took her three evenings, and the young doctor read it over for errors. Rémy showed her how to set it on a machine in the house so that it would be served. At the bottom she put what the other woman had put.
64Rémy read it over her shoulder. "Nobody asked your leave to read hers," he said. "Nobody will ask it to read yours. That is the paper on the board."
65"I know what they signed," said Odile. "I have understood it for some time. It was never a telephone book."
66Hear what became of it. The web grew until it tied together more than half the people of the earth. Not all that was put on it was true. A lie runs along it as fast as anything. And there are those who have built gates upon it after all, and stand at them counting. It is a road, and a road is not a virtue. But it was given, and it has never been wholly taken back.
67Nineteen years after the paper, the city of London held the great games of all the nations. At the opening feast, before the eyes of the world, the Englishman sat at a machine in the middle of the field and sent out one line. It said: "This is for everyone."
68The black cube is kept behind glass now, in the house under the mountains. The label is still on it. The ink has faded, but anyone walking by can read it, and it is still good advice.