by Andre Norton
“It goes like this: ‘Dear Miss Lje: As a syndicated video commentator with a wide audience and heavy responsibilities, you need the best sources of information available. We would like you to test our service, free of charge, in the hope of proving to you that it is superior to any other source of news on Earth. Therefore, we offer below several predictions concerning events to come in the Hercules and the so-called “Three Ghosts” areas. If these predictions are fulfilled 100%—no less—we ask that you take us on as your correspondents for those areas, at rates to be agreed upon later. If the predictions are wrong in any respect, you need not consider us further!”
“H’m,” Weinbaum said slowly. “They’re confident cusses—and that’s an odd juxtaposition. The Three Ghosts make up only a little solar system, while the Hercules area could include the entire star-cluster—or maybe even the whole constellation, which is a hell of a lot of sky. This outfit seems to be trying to tell you that it has thousands of field correspondents of its own, maybe as many as the government itself. If so, I’ll guarantee that they’re bragging.”
“That may well be so. But before you make up your mind, let me read you one of the two predictions.” The letter rustled in Dana Lje’s hand. “ ‘At 03:16:10, on Year Day, 2090, the Hess-type interstellar liner Brindisi will be attacked in the neighborhood of the Three Ghosts system by four—’ ”
Weinbaum sat bolt upright in his swivel chair. “Let me see that letter!” he said, his voice harsh with repressed alarm.
“In a moment,” the girl said, adjusting her skirt composedly. “Evidently I was right in riding my hunch. Let me go on reading: ‘—by four heavily armed vessels flying the lights of the navy of Hammersmith II. The position of the liner at that time will be at coded coordinates 88-A-theta-88-aleph-D and-per-se-and. It will—’ ”
“Miss Lje,” Weinbaum said, “I’m sorry to interrupt you again, but what you’ve said already would justify me in jailing you at once, no matter how loudly your sponsors might scream. I don’t know about this Interstellar Information outfit, or whether or not you did receive any such letter as the one you pretend to be quoting. But I can tell you that you’ve shown yourself to be in possession of information that only yours truly and four other men are supposed to know. It’s already too late to tell you that everything you say may be held against you; all I can say now is, it’s high time you clammed up!”
“I thought so,” she said, apparently not disturbed in the least. “Then that liner is scheduled to hit those coordinates, and the coded time coordinate corresponds with the predicted Universal Time. Is it also true that the Brindisi will be carrying a top-secret communications device?”
“Are you deliberately trying to make me imprison you?” Weinbaum said, gritting his teeth. “Or is this just a stunt, designed to show me that my own bureau is full of leaks?”
“It could turn into that,” Dana admitted. “But it hasn’t, yet. Robin, I’ve been as honest with you as I’m able to be. You’ve had nothing but square deals from me up to now. I wouldn’t yellow-screen you, and you know it. If this unknown outfit has this information, it might easily have gotten it from where it hints that it got it: from the field.”
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because the information in question hasn’t even reached my own agents in the field yet—it couldn’t possibly have leaked as far as Hammersmith II or anywhere else, let alone to the Three Ghosts system! Letters have to be carried on ships, you know that. If I were to send orders by ultrawave to my Three Ghosts agent, he’d have to wait three hundred and twenty-four years to get them. By ship, he can get them in a little over two months. These particular orders have only been under way to him five days. Even if somebody has read them on board the ship that’s carrying them, they couldn’t possibly be sent on to the Three Ghosts any faster than they’re traveling now.”
Dana nodded her dark head. “All right. Then what are we left with but a leak in your headquarters here?”
“What, indeed,” Weinbaum said grimly. “You’d better tell me who signed this letter of yours.”
“The signature is J. Shelby Stevens.”
Weinbaum switched on the intercom. “Margaret, look in the business register for an outfit called Interstellar Information and find out who owns it.”
Dana Lje said, “Aren’t you interested in the rest of the prediction?”
“You bet I am. Does it tell you the name of this communications device?”
“Yes,” Dana said.
“What is it?”
“The Dirac communicator.”
Weinbaum groaned and turned on the intercom again. “Margaret, send in Dr. Wald. Tell him to drop everything and gallop. Any luck with the other thing?”
“Yes, sir,” the intercom said. “It’s a one-man outfit, wholly owned by a J. Shelby Stevens, in Rico City. It was first registered this year.”
“Arrest him, on suspicion of espionage.”
The door swung open and Dr. Wald came in, all six and a half feet of him. He was extremely blond, and looked awkward, gentle, and not very intelligent.
“Thor, this young lady is our press nemesis, Dana Lje. Dana, Dr. Wald is the inventor of the Dirac communicator, about which you have so damnably much information.”
“It’s out already?” Dr. Wald said, scanning the girl with grave deliberation.
“It is, and lots more—lots more. Dana, you’re a good girl at heart, and for some reason I trust you, stupid though it is to trust anybody in this job. I should detain you until Year Day, videocasts or no videocasts. Instead, I’m just going to ask you to sit on what you’ve got, and I’m going to explain why.”
“Shoot.”
“I’ve already mentioned how slow communication is between star and star. We have to carry all our letters on ships, just as we did locally before the invention of the telegraph. The overdrive lets us beat the speed of light, but not by much of a margin over really long distances. Do you understand that?”
“Certainly,” Dana said. She appeared a bit nettled, and Weinbaum decided to give her the full dose at a more rapid pace. After all, she could be assumed to be better informed than the average layman.
“What we’ve needed for a long time, then,” he said, “is some virtually instantaneous method of getting a message from somewhere to anywhere. Any time lag, no matter how small it seems at first, has a way of becoming major as longer and longer distances are involved. Sooner or later we must have this instantaneous method, or we won’t be able to get messages from one system to another fast enough to hold our jurisdiction over outlying regions of space.”
“Wait a minute,” Dana said. “I’d always understood that ultra-wave is faster than light.”
“Effectively it is; physically it isn’t. You don’t understand that?” She shook her dark head.
“In a nutshell,” Weinbaum said, “ultrawave is radiation, and all radiation in free space is limited to the speed of light. The way we hype up ultrawave is to use an old application of wave-guide theory, whereby the real transmission of energy is at light speed, but an imaginary thing called phase velocity is going faster. But the gain in speed of transmission isn’t large—by ultrawave, for instance, we get a message to Alpha Centauri in one year instead of nearly four. Over long distances, that’s not nearly enough extra speed.”
“Can’t it be speeded further?” she said, frowning.
“No. Think of the ultrawave beam between here and Centaurus III as a caterpillar. The caterpillar himself is moving quite slowly, just at the speed of light. But the pulses which pass along his body are going forward faster than he is—and if you’ve ever watched a caterpillar, you’ll know that that’s true. But there’s a physical limit to the number of pulses you can travel along that caterpillar, and we’ve already reached that limit. We’ve taken phase velocity as far as it will go.
“That’s why we need something faster. For a long time our relativity theories discouraged hope of anything faster—even the
high phase velocity of a guided wave didn’t contradict those theories; it just found a limited, mathematically imaginary loophole in them. But when Thor here began looking into the question of the velocity of propagation of a Dirac pulse, he found the answer. The communicator he developed does seem to act over long distances, any distance, instantaneously—and it may wind up knocking relativity into a cocked hat.”
The girl’s face was a study in stunned realization. “I’m not sure I’ve taken in all the technical angles,” she said. “But if I’d had any notion of the political dynamite in this thing—”
“—you’d have kept out of my office,” Weinbaum said grimly. “A good thing you didn’t. The Brindisi is carrying a model of the Dirac communicator out to the periphery for a final test; the ship is supposed to get in touch with me from out there at a given Earth time, which we’ve calculated very elaborately to account for the residual Lorentz and Milne transformations involved in overdrive flighty and for a lot of other time-phenomena that wouldn’t mean anything at all to you.
“If that signal arrives here at the given Earth time, then—aside from the havoc it will create among the theoretical physicists whom we decide to let in on it—we will really have our instant communicator, and can include all of occupied space in the same time-zone. And we’ll have a terrific advantage over any lawbreaker who has to resort to ultrawave locally and to letters carried by ships over the long haul.”
“Not,” Dr. Wald said sourly, “if it’s already leaked out.”
“It remains to be seen how much of it has leaked,” Weinbaum said. “The principle is rather esoteric, Thor, and the name of the thing alone wouldn’t mean much even to a trained scientist. I gather that Dana’s mysterious informant didn’t go into technical details . . . or did he?”
“No,” Dana said.
“Tell the truth, Dana. I know that you’re suppressing some of that letter.”
The girl started slightly. “All right—yes, I am. But nothing technical. There’s another part of the prediction that lists the number and class of ships you will send to protect the Brindisi—the prediction says they’ll be sufficient, by the way—and I’m keeping that to myself, to see whether or not it comes true along with the rest. If it does, I think I’ve hired myself a correspondent.”
“If it does,” Weinbaum said, “you’ve hired yourself a jailbird. Let’s see how much mind-reading J. Whatsit Stevens can do from the sub-cellar of Fort Yaphank.” He abruptly ended the conversation and ushered Dana Lje out with controlled politeness.
III
Weinbaum let himself into Stevens’ cell, locking the door behind him and passing the keys out to the guard. He sat down heavily on the nearest stool.
Stevens smiled the weak benevolent smile of the very old, and laid his book aside on the bunk. The book, Weinbaum knew—since his office had cleared it—was only a volume of pleasant, harmless lyrics by a New Dynasty poet named Nims.
“Were our predictions correct, Captain?” Stevens said. His voice was high and musical, rather like that of a boy soprano. Weinbaum nodded. “You still won’t tell us how you did it?”
“But I already have,” Stevens protested. “Our intelligence network is the best in the Universe, Captain. It is superior even to your own excellent organization, as events have shown.”
“Its results are superior, that I’ll grant,” Weinbaum said glumly. “If Dana Lje had thrown your letter down her disposal chute, we would have lost the Brindisi and our Dirac transmitter both. Incidentally, did your original letter predict accurately the number of ships we would send?”
Stevens nodded pleasantly, his neatly trimmed white beard thrusting forward slightly as he smiled.
“I was afraid so.” Weinbaum leaned forward. “Do you have the Dirac transmitter, Stevens?”
“Of course, Captain. How else could my correspondents report to me with the efficiency you have observed?”
“Then why don’t our receivers pick up the broadcasts of your agents? Dr. Wald says it’s inherent in the principle that Dirac ‘casts are picked up by all instruments tuned to receive them, bar none. And at this stage of the game, there are so few such broadcasts being made that we’d be almost certain to detect any that weren’t coming from our own operatives.”
“I decline to answer that question, if you’ll excuse the impoliteness,” Stevens said, his voice quavering slightly. “I am an old man, Captain, and this intelligence agency is my sole source of income. If I told you how we operated, we would no longer have any advantage over your own service, except for the limited freedom from secrecy which we have. I have been assured by competent lawyers that I have every right to operate a private investigation bureau, properly licensed, upon any scale that I may choose; and that I have the right to keep my methods secret, as the so-called ‘intellectual assets’ of my firm. If you wish to use our services, well and good. We will provide them, with absolute guarantees on all information we furnish you, for an appropriate fee. But our methods are our own property.”
Robin Weinbaum smiled twistedly. “I’m not a naive man, Mr. Stevens,” he said. “My service is hard on naiveté. You know as well as I do that the government can’t allow you to operate on a free-lance basis, supplying top-secret information to anyone who can pay the price, or even free of charge to video columnists on a ‘test’ basis, even though you arrive at every jot of that information independently of espionage—which I still haven’t entirely ruled out, by the way. If you can duplicate this Brindisi performance at will, we will have to have your services exclusively. In short, you become a hired civilian arm of my own bureau.”
“Quite,” Stevens said, returning the smile in a fatherly way. “We anticipated that, of course. However, we have contracts with other governments to consider: Erskine, in particular. If we are to work exclusively for Earth, necessarily our price will include compensation for renouncing our other accounts.”
“Why should it? Patriotic public servants work for their government at a loss, if they can’t work for it any other way.”
“I am quite aware of that. I am quite prepared to renounce my other interests. But I do require to be paid.”
“How much?” Weinbaum said, suddenly aware that his fists were clenched so tightly that they hurt.
Stevens appeared to consider, nodding his flowery white poll in senile deliberation. “My associates would have to be consulted. Tentatively, however, a sum equal to the present appropriation of your bureau would do, pending further negotiations.”
Weinbaum shot to his feet, eyes wide. “You old buccaneer! You know damned well that I can’t spend my entire appropriation on a single civilian service! Did it ever occur to you that most of the civilian outfits working for us are on cost-plus contracts, and that our civilian executives are being paid just a credit a year, by their own choice? You’re demanding nearly two thousand credits an hour from your own government, and claiming the legal protection that the government affords you at the same time, in order to let those fanatics on Erskine run up a higher bid!”
“The price is not unreasonable,” Stevens said. “The service is worth the price.”
“That’s where you’re wrong! We have the discoverer of the machine working for us. For less than half the sum you’re asking, we can find the application of the device that you’re trading on—of that you can be damned sure.”
“A dangerous gamble, Captain.”
“Perhaps. We’ll soon see!” Weinbaum glared at the placid face.
“I’m forced to tell you that you’re a free man, Mr. Stevens. We’ve been unable to show that you came by your information by any illegal method. You had classified facts in your possession, but no classified documents, and it’s your privilege as a citizen to make guesses, no matter how educated.
“But we’ll catch up with you sooner or later. Had you been reasonable, you might have found yourself in a very good position with us, your income as assured as any political income can be, and your person respected to the hilt. Now,
however, you’re subject to censorship—you have no idea how humiliating that can be, but I’m going to see to it that you find out. There’ll be no more newsbeats for Dana Lje, or for anyone else. I want to see every word of copy that you file with any client outside the bureau. Every word that is of use to me will be used, and you’ll be paid the statutory one cent a word for it—the same rate that the FBI pays for anonymous gossip. Everything I don’t find useful will be killed without clearance. Eventually we’ll have the modification of the Dirac that you’re using, and when that happens, you’ll be so flat broke that a pancake with a hare lip could spit right over you.”
Weinbaum paused for a moment, astonished at his own fury.
Stevens’ clarinetlike voice began to sound in the windowless cavity. “Captain, I have no doubt that you can do this to me, at least incompletely. But it will prove fruitless. I will give you a prediction, at no charge. It is guaranteed, as are all our predictions. It is this: You will never find that modification. Eventually, I will give it to you, on my own terms, but you will never find it for yourself, nor will you force it out of me. In the meantime, not a word of copy will be filed with you; for, despite the fact that you are an arm of the government, I can well afford to wait you out.”
“Bluster,” Weinbaum said.
“Fact. Yours is the bluster—loud talk based on nothing more than a hope. I, however, know whereof I speak. . . . But let us conclude this discussion. It serves no purpose; you will need to see my points made the hard way. Thank you for giving me my freedom. We will talk again under different circumstances on—let me see; ah, yes, on June 9th of the year 2091. That year is, I believe, almost upon us.”
Stevens picked up his book again, nodding at Weinbaum, his expression harmless and kindly, his hands showing the marked tremor of paralysis agitans. Weinbaum moved helplessly to the door and flagged the turnkey. As the bars closed behind him, Stevens’ voice called out: “Oh, yes; and a Happy New Year, Captain.”