Assignment in Tomorrow

by Anthology

  “What the hell!” Gilroy gasped. He pulled his leg away startledly and shoved Wood away.

  But Wood came back insistently, holding his paper stretched out to Gilroy as far as possible. He trembled hopefully until the reporter snatched the message out of his mouth. Then his muscles froze, and he stared up expectantly at the angular face, scanning it for signs of growing comprehension.

  Gilroy kept his eyes on the straggling letters. His face darkened angrily.

  “Who’s being a wise guy here?” he shouted suddenly. Most of the staff ignored him. “Who let this mutt in and gave him a crank note to bring to me? Come on—who’s the genius?”

  Wood jumped around him, barking hysterically, trying to explain.

  “Oh, shut up!” Gilroy rapped out. “Hey copy! Take this dog down and see that he doesn’t get back in! He won’t bite you.”

  Again Wood had failed. But he did not feel defeated. When his hysterical dread of frustration ebbed, leaving his mind clear and analytical, he realized that his failure was only one of degree. Actually, he had communicated, but lack of space had prevented him from detailed clarity. The method was correct. He only needed to augment it.

  Before the copy boy cornered him, Wood swooped up at a pencil on an empty desk.

  “Should I let him keep the pencil, Mr. Gilroy?” the boy asked.

  “I’ll lend you mine, unless you want your arm snapped off,” Gilroy snorted, turning back to his typewriter.

  Wood sat back and waited beside the copy boy for the elevator to pick them up. He clenched the pencil possessively between his teeth. He was impatient to get out of the building and back to the lot on West Street, where he could plan a system of writing a more explicit message. His block letters were unmanageably huge and shaky; but, with the same logical detachment he used to employ when he was a code translator, he attacked the problem fearlessly.

  He knew that he could not use the printed or written alphabet. He would have to find a substitute that his clumsy teeth could manage, and that could be compressed into less space.

  Gilroy was annoyed by the collie’s insistent returning. He crumpled the enigmatic, unintelligible note and tossed it in the wastebasket, but beyond considering it as a practical joke, he gave it no further thought.

  His long, large-jointed fingers swiftly tapped out the last page of his story. He ended it with a short line of zeros and dashes, gathered a sheaf of papers, and brought it to the editor.

  The editor studied the lead paragraph intently and skimmed hastily through the rest of the story. He appeared uncomfortable.

  “Not bad, eh?” Gilroy exulted.

  “Uh-what?” The editor jerked his head up blankly. “Oh. No, it’s pretty good. Very good, in fact.”

  “I’ve got to hand it to you,” Gilroy continued admiringly. “I’d have given up. You know-nothing to work on, just a bunch of fantastic events with no beginning and no end. Now, all of a sudden, the cops pick up a nut who acts like a dog and has an incision like the catatonics. Maybe it isn’t any clearer, but at least we’ve got something actually happening. I don’t know—I feel pretty good. We’ll get to the bottom——”

  The editor listened abstractedly, growing more uneasy from sentence to sentence. “Did you see the latest case?” he interrrupted.

  “Sure. I’m in soft with the resident physician. If I hadn’t been following this story right from the start, I’d have said the one they just hauled in was a genuine screwball. He goes bounding around on the door, sniffs at things, and makes a pathetic attempt to bark. But he has an incision on the back of his neck. It’s just like the others—even has two professional stitches, and it’s the same number of millimeters away from the spine. He’s a catatonic, or whatever we’ll have to call it now——”

  “Well, the story’s shaping up faster than I thought it would,” the editor said, evening the edges of Gilroy’s article with ponderous care. “But——” His voice dropped huskily.

  “Well, I don’t know how to tell you this, Gilroy.”

  The reporter drew his brows together and looked at him obliquely. “What’s the hard word this time?” he asked mystified.

  “Oh, the usual thing. You know. I’ve got to take you off this story. It’s too bad, because it was just getting hot. I hated to tell you, Gilroy; but, after all, what the hell. That’s part of the game.”

  “It is, huh?” Gilroy flattened his hands on the desk and leaned over them resentfully. “Whose toes did we step on this time? Nobody’s. The hospital has no kick coming. I couldn’t mention names because I didn’t know any to mention. Well, then, what’s the angle?”

  The editor shrugged. “I can’t argue. It’s a front-office order. But I’ve got a good lead for you to follow tomorrow——”

  Savagely, Gilroy strode to the window and glared out at the darkening street. The business department wasn’t behind the order, he reasoned angrily; they weren’t getting ads from the hospital. And as for the big boss—Talbot never interfered with policy, except when he had to squash a revealing crime story. By eliminating the editors, who yielded an inch when public opinion demanded a mile, the business department, who fought only when advertising was at stake, Gilroy could blame no one but Talbot.

  Gilroy rapped his bony knuckles impatiently against the window casement. What was the point of Talbot’s order? Perhaps he had a new way of paying off traitors. Gilroy dismissed the idea immediately; he knew Talbot wouldn’t go to that expense and risk possible leakage when the old way of sealing a body in a cement block and dumping it in the river was still effective and cheap.

  “I give up,” Gilroy said without turning around. “I can’t figure out Talbot’s angle.”

  “Neither can I,” the editor admitted.

  At that confession, Gilroy wheeled. “Then you know it’s Talbot!”

  “Of course. Who else could it be? But don’t let it throw you, pal.” He glanced around cautiously as he spoke. “Let this catatonic yarn take a rest. Tomorrow you can find out what’s behind this bulletin that Johnson phoned in from City Hall.”

  Gilroy absently scanned the scribbled note. His scowl wrinkled into puzzlement.

  “What the hell is this? All I can make out of it is the A.S.P.C.A. and dog lovers are protesting to the mayor against organized murder of brown-and-white collies.”

  “That’s just what it is.”

  “And you think Talbot’s gang is behind it, naturally.” When the editor nodded, Gilroy threw up his hands in despair. “This gang stuff is getting too deep for me, chief. I used to be able to call their shots. I knew why a torpedo was bumped off, or a crime was pulled; but I don’t mind telling you that I can’t see why a gang boss wants a catatonic yam hushed up, or sends his mob around plugging innocent collies. I’m going home . . . get drunk——”

  He stormed out of the office. Before the editor had time to shrug his shoulders, Gilroy was back again, his deep eyes blazing furiously.

  “What a pair of prize dopes we are, chief!” he shouted. “Remember that collie—the one that came in with a hunk of paper in his mouth? We threw him out, remember? Well, that’s the hound Talbot’s gang is out gunning for! He’s trying to carry messages to us!”

  “Hey, you’re right!” The editor heaved out of the chair and stood uncertainly. “Where is he?”

  Gilroy waved his long arms expressively.

  “Then come on! To hell with hats and coats!”

  They dashed into the staff room. The skeleton night crew loafed around, reading papers before moping out to follow up undeveloped leads.

  “Put those papers down!” the editor shouted. “Come on with me—every one of you.”

  He herded them, baffled and annoyed, into the elevator. At the entrance to the building, he searched up and down the street.

  “He’s not around, Gilroy. All right, you deadbeats, divide up and chase around the streets, whistling. When you see a brown-and-white collie, whistle to him. He’ll come to you. Now beat it and do as I say.”

 
They moved off slowly. “Whistle?” one called back anxiously.

  “Yes, whistle!” Gilroy declared. “Forget your dignity. Whistle!”

  They scattered, whistling piercingly the signals that are supposed to attract dogs. The few people around the business district that late were highly interested and curious, but Gilroy left the editor whistling at the newspaper building, while he whistled toward West Street. He left the shrill calls blowing away from the river, and searched along the wide highway in the growing dark.

  For an hour he pried into dark spaces between the docks, patiently covering his ground. He found nothing but occasional longshoremen unloading trucks and a light uptown traffic. There were only homeless, prowling mongrels and starving drifters; no brown-and-white collie.

  He gave up when he began to feel hungry. He returned to the building hoping the others had more luck, and angry with himself for not having followed the dog when he had the chance.

  The editor was still there, whistling more frantically than ever. He had gathered a little band of inquisitive onlookers, who waited hopefully for something to happen. The reporters were also returning.

  “Find anything?” the editor paused to ask.

  “Nope. He didn’t show up here?”

  “Not yet. Oh, he’ll be back, all right. I’m not afraid of that.” And he went back to his persistent whistling, disregarding stares and rude remarks. He was a man with an iron will. He sneered openly at the defeated reporters when they slunk past him into the building.

  In the comparative quiet of the city, above the editor’s shrills, Gilroy heard swiftly pounding feet. He gazed over the heads of the pack that had gathered around the editor.

  A reporter burst into view, running at top speed and doing his best to whistle attractively through dry lips at a dog streaking away from him.

  “Here he comes!” Gilroy shouted. He broke through the crowd and his long legs flashed over the distance to the collie. In his excitement, empty, toneless wind blew between his teeth; but the dog shot straight for him just the same. Gilroy snatched a dirty piece of paper out of his mouth. Then the dog was gone, toward the docks; and a black car rode ominously down the street.

  Gilroy half started in pursuit, paused, and stared at the slip of paper in his hand. For a moment he blamed the insufficient light, but when the editor came up to him, yelling blasphemy for letting the dog escape, Gilroy handed him the unbelievable note.

  “That dog can take care of himself,” Gilroy said. “Read this.”

  The editor drew his brows together over the message. It read:

  ;;;,.;.; ;,.::,.”::..:,:. ;,;. ..”;:,:;::..::..;,.”.:;.; ..::;”:”;,.. ”..;”:”.;.;.::;.:;”.;.”” ”;”.;; .:.”;,..::,:;..;;:, ”:.”;.;; ..”;:,;;

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” the editor exclaimed. “Is it a gag?”

  “Gag, my eye!”

  “Well, I can’t make head or tail of it!” the editor protested.

  Gilroy looked around undeterminedly, as if for someone to help them. “You’re not supposed to. It’s a code message.”

  He swung around, stabbing an enormously long, knobbed finger at the editor. “Know anyone who can translate codecryptograms?”

  “Uh—let’s see. How about the police, or the G-men——”

  Gilroy snorted. “Give it to the bulls before we know what’s in it!” He carefully tucked the crudely penciled note into his breast pocket and buttoned his coat. “You stick around outside here, chief, I’ll be back with the translation. Keep an eye out for the pooch.”

  He loped off before the editor could more than open his mouth.

  In the index room of the Forty-second Street Library, Gilroy crowded into the telephone booth and dialed a number. His eyes ached and he had a dizzy headache. Close reasoning always scrambled his wits. His mind was intuitive rather than ploddingly analytical.

  “Executive office, please,” he told the night operator. “There must be somebody there. I don’t care if it’s the business manager himself. I want to speak to somebody in the executive office. I’ll wait.” He lolled, bent into a convenient shape, against the wall. “Hello. Who’s this? . . . Oh, good. Listen, Rothbart, this is Gilroy. Do me a favor, huh? You’re nearest the front entrance. You’ll find the chief outside the door. Send him to the telephone, and take his place until he gets through. While you’re out there, watch for a brown-and-white collie. Nab him if he shows up and bring him inside . . . Will you? . . . Thanks!”

  Gilroy held the receiver to his ear, defeatedly amusing himself by identifying the sounds coming over the wire. He was no longer in a hurry, and when he had to pay another nickel before the editor finally came to the telephone, he did not mind.

  “What’s up, Gilroy?” the editor asked hopefully.

  “Nothing, chief. That’s why I called up. I went through a military code book, some kids’ stuff, and a history of cryptography through the ages. I found some good codes, but nobody seems to’ve thought of this punctuation code. Ever see the Confederate cipher? Boy, it’s a real dazzler—wasn’t cracked until after the Civil War was over! The old Greeks wound strips of paper around identical sticks. When they were unrolled, the strips were gibberish; around the sticks, the words fell right into order.”

  “Cut it out,” the editor snapped. “Did you find anything useful?”

  “Sure. Everybody says the big clue is the table of frequency—the letters used more often than others. But, on the other hand, they say that in short messages, like ours, important clues like the single words ‘a’ and ‘I,’ bigrams like ‘am,’ ‘as,’ and even trigrams like ‘the’ or ‘but,’ are often omitted entirely.”

  “Well, that’s fine. What’re you going to do now?”

  “I don’t know. Try the cops after all, I guess.”

  “Nothing doing,” the editor said firmly. “Ask a librarian to help.”

  Gilroy seized the inspiration. He slammed down the receiver and strode to the reference desk.

  “Where can I get hold of somebody who knows cryptograms?” he rasped.

  The attendant politely consulted his colleagues. “The guard of the manuscript room is pretty good,” he said, returning. “Down the hall——”

  Gilroy shouted his thanks and broke into an ungainly run, ignoring the attendant’s order to walk. At the manuscript room he clattered the gate until the keeper appeared and let him in.

  “Take a look at this,” he commanded, flinging the message on a table.

  The keeper glanced curiously at it. “Oh, cryptograms, eh?”

  “Yeah. Can you make anything out of it?”

  “Well, it looks like a good one,” the guard replied cautiously, “but I’ve been cracking them all for the last twenty years.” They sat down at the table in the empty room. For some time the guard stared fixedly at the scrawled note. “Five symbols,” he said finally. “Semicolon, period, comma, colon, quotation marks. Thirteen word units, each with an even number of symbols. They must be used in combinations of two.”

  “I figured that out already,” Gilroy rapped out. “What’s it say?”

  The guard lifted his head, offended. “Give me a chance. Bacon’s code wasn’t solved for three centuries.”

  Gilroy groaned. He did not have so much time on his hands. “There’re only thirteen word units here,” the guard went on, undaunted by the Bacon example. “Can’t use frequency, bigrams or trigrams.”

  “I know that already,” Gilroy said hoarsely.

  “Then why’d you come to me if you’re so smart?”

  Gilroy hitched his chair away. “O.K., I won’t bother you.”

  “Five symbols to represent twenty-six letters. Can’t be. Must be something like the Russian nihilist code. They can represent only twenty-five letters. The missing one is either ‘q’ or ‘j,’ most likely, because they’re not used much. Well, I’ll tell you what I think.”

  “What’s that?” Gilroy demanded, all alert.

  “You’ll have to reason a priori or whatever it is.”<
br />
  “Any way you want,” Gilroy sighed. “Just get on with it.”

  “The square root of twenty-five is five. Whoever wrote this note must’ve made a square of letters, five wide and five deep. That sounds right.” The guard smiled and nodded cheerfully. “Possible combinations in a square of twenty-five letters is . . . uh . . . 625. The double symbols must identify the lines down and across. Possible combinations, twenty-five. Combinations all told . . . hm-m-m . . . 15,625. Not so good. If there’s a key word, we’ll have to search the dictionary until we find it. Possible combinations, 15,625 multiplied by the English vocabulary—that is, if the key word is English.”

  Gilroy raised himself to his feet. “I can’t stand it,” he moaned. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

  “No, don’t go,” the guard said. “You’ve been helping me a lot. I don’t think we’ll have to go through more than 625 combinations at the most. That’ll take no time at all.”

  He spoke, of course, in relative terms. Bacon code, three centuries; Confederate code, fifteen years; war-time Russian code, unsolved. Cryptographers must look forward to eternity.

  Gilroy seated himself, while the guard plotted a square:

  ;

  ”

  ,

  .

  :

  a

  b

  c

  d

  e

  ;

  f

  g

  h

  i

  j

  ”

  k

  l

  m

  n

  o

  ,

  p

  r

  s

  t

  u

  .

  v

  w

  x

  y

  z

  :

  The first symbol combination, two semicolons, translated to “a,” by reading down the first line, from the top semicolon, and across from the side semicolon. The next, a semicolon and a comma, read “k.” He went on in this fashion until he screwed up his face and pushed the half-completed translation to Gilroy. It read: