by Andre Norton
Weinbaum blasted his way back into his own office, at least twice as mad as the proverbial nest of hornets, and at the same time rather dismally aware of his own probable future. If Stevens’ second prediction turned out to be as phenomenally accurate as his first had been, Captain Robin Weinbaum would soon be peddling a natty set of secondhand uniforms.
He glared down at Margaret Soames, his receptionist. She glared right back; she had known him too long to be intimidated. “Anything?” he said.
“Dr. Wald’s waiting for you in your office. There are some field reports, and a couple of Diracs on your private tape. Any luck with the old codger?”
“That,” he said crushingly, “is Top Secret.”
“Poof. That means that nobody still knows the answer but J. Shelby Stevens.”
He collapsed suddenly. “You’re so right. That’s just what it does mean. But we’ll bust him wide open sooner or later. We’ve got to.”
“You’ll do it,” Margaret said. “Anything else for me?”
“No. Tip off the clerical staff that there’s a half-holiday today, then go take in a stereo or a steak or something yourself. Dr. Wald and I have a few private wires to pull . . .”
“Right,” the receptionist said.
As soon as the door closed, his mood became abruptly as black as before. Despite his comparative youth—he was now only fifty-five—he had been in the service a long time, and he needed no one to tell him the possible consequences which might flow from possession by a private citizen of the Dirac communicator. If there was ever to be a Federation of Man in the Galaxy, it was within the power of J. Shelby Stevens to ruin it before it had fairly gotten started. And there seemed to be nothing at all that could be done about it.
“Hello, Thor,” he said glumly.
“Hello, Robin. I gather things went badly. Tell me about it.” Briefly, Weinbaum told him. “And the worst of it,” he finished, “is that Stevens himself predicts that we won’t find the application of the Dirac that he’s using, and that eventually we’ll have to buy it at his price. Somehow I believe him—but I can’t see how it’s possible. If I were to tell Congress that I was going to spend my entire appropriation for a single civilian service, I’d be out on my ear within the next three sessions.”
“Perhaps that isn’t his real price,” the scientist suggested. “If he wants to barter, he’d naturally begin with a demand miles above what he actually wants.”
“Sure, sure . . . but frankly, Thor, I’d hate to give the old reprobate even a single credit if I could get out of it.” Weinbaum sighed. “Well, let’s see what’s come in from the field.”
Thor Wald moved silently away from Weinbaum’s desk while the officer unfolded it and set up the Dirac screen. Stacked neatly next to the ultraphone—a device Weinbaum had been thinking of, only a few days ago, as permanently outmoded—were the tapes Margaret had mentioned. He fed the first one into the Dirac and turned the main toggle to the position labeled Start.
Immediately the whole screen went pure white and the audio speakers emitted an almost instantly end-stopped blare of sound—a beep which, as Weinbaum already knew, made up a continuous spectrum from about 30 cycles per second to well above 18,000 cps. Then both the light and the noise were gone as if they had never been, and were replaced by the familiar face and voice of Weinbaum’s local ops chief in Rico City.
“There’s nothing unusual in the way of transmitters in Stevens’ offices here,” the operative said without preamble. “And there isn’t any local Interstellar Information staff, except for one stenographer, and she’s as dumb as they come. About all we could get from her is that Stevens is ‘such a sweet old man.’ No possibility that she’s faking it; she’s genuinely stupid, the kind that thinks Betelgevse is something Indians use to darken their skins. We looked for some sort of list or code table that would give us a line on Stevens’ field staff, but that was another dead end. Now we’re maintaining a twenty-four hour Dinwiddie watch on the place from a joint across the street. Orders?”
Weinbaum dictated to the blank stretch of tape which followed: “Margaret, next time you send any Dirac tapes in here, cut that damnable beep off them first. Tell the boys in Rico City that Stevens has been released, and that I’m proceeding for an Order In Security to tap his ultraphone and his local lines—this is one case where I’m sure we can persuade the court that tapping’s necessary. Also—and be sure you code this—tell them to proceed with the tap immediately and to maintain it regardless of whether or not the court okays it. I’ll thumbprint a Full Responsibility Confession for them. We can’t afford to play patty-cake with Stevens—the potential is just too damned big. And oh, yes, Margaret, send the message by carrier, and send out general orders to everybody concerned not to use the Dirac again except when distance and time rule every other medium out. Stevens has already admitted that he can receive Dirac ‘casts.”
He put down the mike and stared morosely for a moment at the beautiful Eridanean scrollwood of his desktop. Wald coughed inquiringly.
“Excuse me, Robin,” he said, “but I should think that would work both ways.”
“So should I. And yet the fact is that we’ve never picked up so much as a whisper from either Stevens or his agents. I can’t think of any way that could be pulled, but evidently it can.”
“Well, let’s rethink the problem, and see what we get,” Wald said. “I didn’t want to say so in front of the young lady, for obvious reasons—I mean Miss Lje, of course, not Margaret—but the truth is that the Dirac is essentially a simple mechanism in principle. I seriously doubt that there’s any way to transmit a message from it which can’t be detected—and an examination of the theory with that proviso in mind might give us something new.”
“What proviso?” Weinbaum said. Thor Wald left him behind rather often these days.
“Why, that a Dirac transmission doesn’t necessarily go to all communicators capable of receiving it. If that’s true, then the reasons why it is true should emerge from the theory.”
“I see. Okay, proceed on that line. I’ve been looking at Stevens’ dossier while you were talking, and it’s an absolute desert. Prior to the opening of the office in Rico City, there’s no dope whatever on J. Shelby Stevens. The man as good as rubbed my nose in the fact that he’s using a pseud when I first talked to him. I asked him what the ‘J’ in his name stood for, and he said, ‘Oh, let’s make it Jerome.’ But who the man behind the pseud is—”
“Is it possible that he’s using his own initials?”
“No,” Weinbaum said. “Only the dumbest ever do that, or transpose syllables, or retain any connection at all with their real names. Those are the people who are in serious emotional trouble, people who drive themselves into anonymity, but leave clues strewn all around the landscape—those clues are really a cry for help, for discovery. Of course we’re working on that angle—we can’t neglect anything—but J. Shelby Stevens isn’t that kind of case, I’m sure.” Weinbaum stood up abruptly. “Okay, Thor—what’s first on your technical program?”
“Well . . . I suppose we’ll have to start with checking the frequencies we use. We’re going on Dirac’s assumption—and it works very well, and always has—that a positron in motion through a crystal lattice is accompanied by de Broglie waves which are transforms of the waves of an electron in motion somewhere else in the Universe. Thus if we control the frequency and path of the positron, we control the placement of the electron—we cause it to appear, so to speak, in the circuits of a communicator somewhere else. After that, reception is just a matter of amplifying the bursts and reading the signal.”
Wald scowled and shook his blond head. “If Stevens is getting out messages which we don’t pick up, my first assumption would be that he’s worked out a fine-tuning circuit that’s more delicate than ours, and is more or less sneaking his messages under ours. The only way that could be done, as far as I can see at the moment, is by something really fantastic in the way of exact frequency control of his p
ositron-gun. If so, the logical step for us is to go back to the beginning of our tests and re-run our diffractions to see if we can refine our measurements of positron frequencies.”
The scientist looked so inexpressibly gloomy as he offered this conclusion that a pall of hopelessness settled over Weinbaum in sheer sympathy. “You don’t look as if you expected that to uncover anything new.”
“I don’t. You see, Robin, things are different in physics now than they used to be in the Twentieth Century. In those days, it was always presupposed that physics was limitless—the classic statement was made by Weyl, who said that ‘It is the nature of a real thing to be inexhaustible in content.’ We know now that that’s not so, except in a remote, associational sort of way. Nowadays, physics is a defined and self-limited science; its scope is still prodigious, but we can no longer think of it as endless.
‘This is better established in particle physics than in any other branch of the science. Half of the trouble physicists of the last century had with Euclidean geometry—and hence the reason why they evolved so many recomplicated theories of relativity—is that it’s a geometry of lines, and thus can be subdivided infinitely. When Cantor proved that there really is an infinity, at least mathematically speaking, that seemed to clinch the case for the possibility of a really infinite physical universe, too.”
“I remember,” Wald continued, “the man who taught me theory of sets at Princeton, many years ago. He used to say: ‘Cantor teaches us that there are many kinds of infinities.’ There was a crazy old man!”
“So go on, Thor.”
“Oh,” Wald blinked. “Yes. Well, what we know now is that the geometry which applies to ultimate particles, like the positron, isn’t Euclidean at all. It’s Pythagorean—a geometry of points, not lines. Once you’ve measured one of those points, and it doesn’t matter what kind of quantity you’re measuring, you’re down as far as you can go. At that point, the Universe becomes discontinuous, and no further refinement is possible.
“And I’d say that our positron-frequency measurements have already gotten that far down. There isn’t another element in the Universe denser than plutonium, yet we get the same frequency-values by diffraction through plutonium crystals that we get through osmium crystals—there’s not the slightest difference. If J. Shelby Stevens is operating in terms of fractions of those values, then he’s doing what an organist would call ‘playing in the cracks’—which is certainly something you can think about doing, but something that’s in actuality impossible to do.”
“Maybe Stevens has rebuilt the organ?”
“If he has rebuilt the metrical frame of the Universe to accommodate a private skip-tracing firm,” Wald said firmly, “I for one see no reason why we can’t counter-check him by declaring the whole cosmos null and void.”
“All right, all right,” Weinbaum said, grinning. “I didn’t mean to push your analogy right over the edge—I was just asking. But let’s get to work on it anyhow. We can’t just sit here and let Stevens get away with it. If this frequency angle turns out to be as hopeless as it seems, we’ll try something else.”
“It’s a very pretty problem,” Wald said.
The computer occupied an entire floor of the Security building, its seemingly identical banks laid out side by side on the floor along an advanced pathological state of Peano’s “space-filling curve.” At the current business end of the line was a master control board with a large television screen at its center, at which Dr. Wald was stationed, with Weinbaum looking, silently but anxiously, over his shoulder.
The screen itself showed a pattern which, except that it was drawn in green light against a dark gray background, strongly resembled the grain in a piece of highly polished mahogany. Photographs of similar patterns were stacked on a small table to Dr. Wald’s right; several had spilled over onto the floor.
“Well, there it is,” Wald sighed at length. “And I won’t struggle to keep myself from saying ‘I told you so.’ What you’ve had me do here, Robin, is to reconfirm about half the basic postulates of particle physics—which is why it took so long, even though it was the first project we started.” He snapped off the screen. “There are no cracks for J. Shelby to play in. That’s definite.”
“If you’d said ‘That’s flat,’ you would have made a joke,” Weinbaum said sourly. “Look . . . isn’t there still a chance of error? If not on your part, Thor, then in the computer? After all, it’s set up to work only with the unit charges of modern physics; mightn’t we have to disconnect the banks that contain that bias before the machine will follow the fractional-charge instructions we give it?”
“Disconnect, he says,” Wald groaned, mopping his brow reflectively. “The bias exists everywhere in the machine, my friend, because it functions everywhere on those same unit charges. It wasn’t a matter of subtracting banks; we had to add one with a bias all its own, to counter-correct the corrections the computer would otherwise apply to the instructions. The technicians thought I was crazy. Now, five months later, I’ve proved it.”
Weinbaum grinned in spite of himself. “What about the other projects?”
“All done—some time back, as a matter of fact. The staff and I checked every single Dirac tape we’ve received since you released J. Shelby from Yaphank, for any sign of intermodulation, marginal signals, or anything else of the kind. There’s nothing, Robin, absolutely nothing. That’s our net result, all around.”
“Which leaves us just where we started,” Weinbaum said. “All the monitoring projects came to the same dead end; I strongly suspect that Stevens hasn’t risked any further calls from his home office to his field staff, even though he seemed confident that we’d never intercept such calls—as we haven’t. Even our local wiretapping hasn’t turned up anything but calls by Stevens’ secretary, making appointments for him with various clients, actual and potential. Any information he’s selling these days he’s passing on in person—and not in his office, either, because we’ve got bugs planted all over that and haven’t heard a thing.”
“That must limit his range of operation enormously,” Wald objected.
Weinbaum nodded. “Without a doubt—but he shows no signs of being bothered by it. He can’t have sent any tips to Erskine recently, for instance, because our last tangle with that crew came out very well for us, even though we had to use the Dirac to send the orders to our squadron out there. If he overheard us, he didn’t even try to pass the word. Just as he said, he’s sweating us out—” Weinbaum paused. “Wait a minute, here comes Margaret, And by the length of her stride, I’d say she’s got something particularly nasty on her mind.”
“You bet I do,” Margaret Soames said vindictively. “And it’ll blow plenty of lids around here, or I miss my guess. The I.D. squad has finally pinned down J. Shelby Stevens. They did it with the voice-comparator alone.”
“How does that work?” Wald said interestedly.
“Blink microphone,” Weinbaum said impatiently. “Isolates inflections on single, normally stressed syllables and matches them. Standard I.D. searching technique, on a case of this kind, but it takes so long that we usually get the quarry by other means before it pays off. Well, don’t stand there like a dummy, Margaret. Who is he?”
“ ‘He,’ ” Margaret said, “is your sweetheart of the video waves, Miss Dana Lje.”
“They’re crazy!” Wald said, staring at her.
Weinbaum came slowly out of his first shock of stunned disbelief. “No, Thor,” he said finally. “No, it figures. If a woman is going to go in for disguises, there are always two she can assume outside her own sex: a young boy, and a very old man. And Dana’s an actress; that’s no news to us.”
“But—but why did she do it, Robin?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out right now. So we wouldn’t get the Dirac modification by ourselves, eh! Well, there are other ways of getting answers besides particle physics. Margaret, do you have a pick-up order out for that girl?”
“No,” the reception
ist said. “This is one chestnut I wanted to see you pull out for yourself. You give me the authority, and I send the order—not before.”
“Spiteful child. Send it, then, and glory in my gritted teeth. Come on, Thor—let’s put the nutcracker on this chestnut.”
As they were leaving the computer floor, Weinbaum stopped suddenly in his tracks and began to mutter in an almost inaudible voice.
Wald said, “What’s the matter, Robin?”
“Nothing. I keep being brought up short by those predictions. What’s the date?”
“M’m . . . June 9th. Why?”
“It’s the exact date that ‘Stevens’ predicted we’d meet again, damn it! Something tells me that this isn’t going to be as simple as it looks.”
If Dana Lje had any idea of what she was in for—and considering the fact that she was ‘J. Shelby Stevens’ it had to be assumed that she did—the knowledge seemed not to make her at all fearful. She sat as composedly as ever before Weinbaum’s desk, smoking her eternal cigarette, and waited, one dimpled knee pointed directly at the bridge of the officer’s nose.
“Dana,” Weinbaum said, “this time we’re going to get all the answers, and we’re not going to be gentle about it. Just in case you’re not aware of the fact, there are certain laws relating to giving false information to a security officer, under which we could heave you in prison for a minimum of fifteen years. By application of the statutes on using communications to defraud, plus various local laws against transvestism, pseudonymity, and so on, we could probably pile up enough additional short sentences to keep you in Yaphank until you really do grow a beard. So I’d advise you to open up.”
“I have every intention of opening up,” Dana said. “I know, practically word for word, how this interview is going to proceed, what information I’m going to give you, just when I’m going to give it to you—and what you’re going to pay me for it. I knew all that many months ago. So there would be no point in my holding out on you.”