The Children's War

by Stroyar, J. N.

  He explained, “I’ve been through a lot and I really don’t know what I’m capableof anymore. Tadek’s right—you would invest a lot of time and effort in me. I’d like to know that I’m up to it.”

  So it was agreed; he would pass one more test, but this time it would be the sort of test he understood, and for the first time in a long time he felt no real fear.

  3

  “YOU STILL FEAR ME, don’t you?” the voice asked.

  He did not know the correct answer, so he said nothing. He lay there, curled on the floor, his eyes closed in defense against the pain.

  “I know you’re awake,” the voice chided, “and you will be punished for not answering.”

  He opened his eyes to stare at the smooth polished leather of his tormentor’s boots. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to say.”

  “That’s also wrong. As wrong as fearing us. And for that you will also be punished.”

  “I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do,” he moaned.

  “You’re not supposed to understand. You’re not supposed to think. Or feel.

  Or even fear. You just obey. It’s that simple.” The uniform came into view as his tormentor stooped down to grab his arm. “You’ll like this one. Something really special, just for you.” A hand, holding a syringe, came toward him.

  “No! No syringes!”

  The psychiatrist looked at him in surprise. “But you just said it was okay.”

  “No. No, it’s not.”

  “It will help you remember,” she assured him patiently. “You’ll relax.”

  He shook his head, more to clear it than to disagree.“No needles.” She surveyed him for a long moment, her patience obviously at an end, then sighing, she put the medication away. “Fine. We’ll do it your way. But let me warn you, the Council will be informed of your lack of cooperation.”

  It wouldn’t be the first time, he thought.

  “Nor the last,” Zosia added when he had told her about his interview with Katerina’s researcher. “Don’t worry, they’ll be gone soon enough.”

  “And when they are, I will never again talk about these things with anyone,” he asserted, then he paused and added, “Except maybe you.”

  Zosia pursed her lips.

  Tadek, standing next to her, snorted. “Now, about this decoding test.”

  “How did you two get assigned to do this?” Peter asked.

  Tadek snorted again. Zosia answered, “Apparently we volunteered. Anyway, here’s what we came up with.” She handed him a single sheet of paper. The entire page was a string of numbers, nothing else. “There are three separate passages.”

  “Don’t tell him that! Let him work it out,” Tadek snapped.

  “Oh, it’s obvious.” He grabbed a pencil and drew a line on the page. “One of them ends about here.” He drew another line, farther down. “And the other ends around here.”

  Tadek and Zosia looked at each other in amazement. Finally Tadek stammered, “That’s right. How did you know that?”

  “You didn’t put this together, did you?”

  They shook their heads sheepishly.“How could you tell?”

  “Who did?”

  Zosia and Tadek looked at each other almost guiltily. Finally Zosia answered, “We had HQ send something—they have analysts there. We tried, we looked up some old documents and their translations—but we had no idea what to do. So we explained the situation and asked them to send something.”

  “Just as well, I suppose they’ll have sent something feasible as a test.” In fact, he thought as he perused the sheet, they’ve sent a child’s game. He spared a mental thank-you to his counterparts at HQ who had decided to be so gentle with him.

  “But how did you know there were three separate codes?”

  “Just look at it,” he said, enjoying his little triumph. “The patterns are absolutely different.”

  “What patterns?”

  “Look at this first set—the numbers are nearly random and evenly distributedfrom zero to ninety-nine. So, each number clearly does not represent an individual letter—otherwise the numbers wouldn’t be so random. It’s some sort of homophonic cipher.”

  “A what?”

  “And that means, since it’s so short and I don’t have time or computing capabilities, that I almost certainly won’t be able to decipher it without more information.”

  “Oh.”

  “They did send along some extra information, didn’t they?”

  “Yes, how’d you—”

  “But this next section here—see? They’ve just strung together numbers that are clearly simply substitutions for letters. And there’s a lot of structure—see how often twelve appears? It’s probably something fairly simple like a monoalphabetic cipher.”

  “And the third passage?” Tadek asked, fascinated.

  “Well, it doesn’t look random, and again the numbers are limited, so I’d guess they just put in numbers for letters—but the structure looks weaker than the second passage.”

  “So?”

  “So, it’s probably some combination. Maybe a VigenËre cipher with a finite keyword—that would be a nice, simple test. I can calculate an index of coincidence and tell you more; it’ll just take time.”

  “How much time?” Tadek pressed.

  “I’ll tell you”—Peter smiled wickedly—“when I’m done. Now, do I get any background information?”

  “Why should you?”

  “It’s rare that there is absolutely no idea what a document is about. These are rather short passages: to be fair, I at least deserve some sort of realistic scenario of where this originated or some general idea of what it might be about. Even a bit of cleartext—especially for the first passage.”

  Zosia raised her eyebrows at Tadek.

  Peter added, “And besides, I’m sure they told you to give me the extra information, didn’t they?”

  “Yes,” Tadek admitted sheepishly, and handed over another sheet of paper.

  Peter knew then, before he had even started, that he had passed their little test. He felt an overwhelming rush of pleasure at the knowledge that it was all still there! All those years of soul-destroying work, numerous beatings, humiliation, sickness, hunger, loneliness—none of it had taken his knowledge away from him. It was all still there! It would take work to recapture the details, to catch up on new developments, to reconstruct a way of thinking, but he no longer doubted his own abilities—they had survived, just as he had. It was all still there!

  After he presented the Council with his results, he was quickly put to work analyzing, or at least organizing, stacks of information that had accumulated.Apparently, for a long time they had not had anybody who could seriously attack intercepted messages. As recently as three years ago, they had had three analysts. Two had been seconded to Warszawa—that is, to the region that had once contained the capital city of Warsaw and was now dominated by the concrete colossus of Göringstadt—to work on a major project. The third had been Marysia’s husband. He was supposed to have trained successors, but had suffered a nervous breakdown after the death of his daughter and had wanted to retire to a village with a reasonably safe set of papers. Marysia had steadfastly refused and they had eventually divorced. In deference to his years of loyal service he was provided with a safe retirement, but Marysia’s bitterness at his abandonment was still evident, and the subject of her ex-husband was tactfully avoided.

  Items of seeming importance had been forwarded to headquarters, but a mountain of presumably trivial information had, in the meanwhile, accumulated. And how it had accumulated! Nobody had bothered to sort the documents, broadcasts, and electronic messages by source or date or possible subject. Peter was simply shown to a storeroom full of papers and tapes and told to do what he could with it.

  Over time he managed to sort and prioritize and translate. Week after week he presented to the Council the fruits of his labors. They politely stifled their yawns at the lists of winter coats and orders for fertilize
r. He begged for assistance, convinced that if the information, tedious as it was, was correlated, it might provide useful demographic and economic information. They agreed and assigned Olek and a seventeen-year-old, Barbara, as his part-time staff.

  During the Christmas holidays, he began to badger the Council to provide him with his own computer. It was simply impossible to do reasonable work constantly begging time on other people’s machines. And what were they using them for anyway? He harassed the Council mercilessly, accosting members in the hall, demanding to know when they would finally provide him with adequate equipment. There could be something important among all that dross and they would never know it! Not at the rate he had to proceed!

  Eventually they agreed. He appeared at a Council meeting in January with his report in hand, ready to begin his demands again, when he was preempted by Katerina. She raised her hand as he stood to speak and said, “Enough. Enough. Before you say a word, we want you to know that we have pulled every string we have with HQ. We have called in every favor. We have reminded them that they have stolen our two best analysts without replacing them; we brought up the painful subject of our Marysia’s ex-husband; we have groveled and implored and cajoled on your behalf. So not a word! You will get your damn machine.”

  Peter grinned, set his week’s work on the table, and without saying a word, promptly left.

  It took another month before the machine finally materialized. Peter was summoned from his storeroom office to the Council meeting room. Only

  Katerina, Zosia, and Tomek were there. Zosia pointed to the small box on the table and watched with delight as he opened its cover.

  “It’s so small!”

  “But look at what it can do.” She almost giggled as she switched it on. “It was delivered this morning and I’ve been trying it out. It’s better than mine!”

  He looked at the compact gray box and the screen that had leapt to life. “It’s beautiful!” Over the past months, he had learned much from Zosia and others about the current state of computers and software, but he had never seen anything so compact and ostensibly powerful before.

  “Isn’t it great?” Zosia asked as though she had invented it herself.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s no comparison with the clunky old things that I’ve seen in the ministry.”

  “I’m not surprised. We got this from America. Apparently they’re sold on the open market there. Available to just about anyone. Can you imagine?”

  “No,” Peter sighed. What sort of place sold such exquisite technology on the open market? “Why doesn’t the Reich just import them then?”

  Tomek answered, “Oh, the Americans forbid their export; besides, they’re priced in dollars and so are, for us, phenomenally expensive.”

  “And so you should be grateful,” Katerina added.

  Peter pressed a few keys, studied the listed files, and shook his head in slight wonder.

  “We had some stuff loaded on it for you,” Tomek explained. “Latest math programs, that sort of stuff. At least that’s what our people in the NAU claimed. Unfortunately, you’re on your own in working out what it all does, but they said it would be useful.”

  “You mean this was specifically sent for me, all the way across the Atlantic?”

  “Yeah, the PDA—that’s the Polish Defense Association—they organize funds and send shipments of equipment and arms periodically. No doubt your little machine here was part of a fund-raising drive: dinners, speeches, broadsides.”Tomek laughed.

  Peter laughed, too. What a wonderful thing it must be to live in a free land. Fund-raising dinners! He could barely imagine what a strange world must exist on the far side of the Atlantic.

  4

  “YOU’VE BEEN THERE?” Peter asked. “I never have. Tell me about it.”

  “Of course, I’ll bore you senseless!” Marysia laughed. “But perhaps you’d prefer-to go there yourself someday?”

  “America? Of course, I’d love to see it, but who the hell would pay to send me there?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you could do a speaking tour. You know, talk about what it’s like in the Reich.”

  He shook his head emphatically. “Never.”

  “Never?”

  “One of you could talk—that’d be interesting. But for me to talk about my past? No, I’d never do that. I have trouble enough with it as it is.”

  “You seem to be doing okay.”

  “I get a lot of help from you all, from my friends,” Peter admitted shyly.

  Marysia smiled weakly at him, then raising her glass, suggested, “Here’s to friendship.”

  He raised his in agreement. “To friendship, and to your kind generosity in taking me in.”

  “How could I ignore a poor, starving stray like you on my doorstep? Sleeping in that lousy dorm room, eating in our, er, ‘restaurant,’ poor thing . . .”

  He laughed at her pathetic description of what was, to him, a wonderful life. It was true that after a short while he had been moved from the one rather comfortable guest room to one of the more spartan dormitory-like rooms that were reserved for the transient staff, but that had only increased his sense of security and belonging. The rooms had no kitchen and he was used to taking his meals in the mess hall, where the much despised menu was, to him, luxurious. Even better, though, was that Marysia apparently had taken him under her wing and frequently offered him meals, often with other guests, or occasionally, such as tonight, alone.

  “And speaking of friends,” Marysia continued, “I want to tell you about yours.”

  He lowered his glass. “What do you know?” he forced himself to ask.

  “Don’t worry.” She then told him that, according to the records, every member-of his group had indeed been arrested and all of them had perished, but beyond that, the records were removed from access. Too long ago and unimportant or too sensitive and vital? Who knew. Their fates made it clear that if any one of them had betrayed the group, then he or she had been double-crossed or the records had been appropriately adjusted to hide his or her involvement.

  “But I always knew it didn’t come from within.”

  “How so? Were they all that trustworthy?” Marysia asked with obvious, but controlled, cynicism.

  He shook his head. “No, it’s not naÔvetó on my part.” He paused a moment, then came to a decision. “On my first night here, I didn’t explain everything as clearly as I could have to Zosia.”

  Marysia raised an eyebrow. “Then you should clear the air.”

  “I suppose so,” he agreed reluctantly. “All right. The detail I left out was that our research group was large so that we could have a lot of expertise available, but we subdivided it for reasons of safety. There were six separate cells of three or four people each, depending on their discipline. A member of a cell only knew the othermembers of their cell, and even then they were only supposed to have the most minimal information on their coworkers. So, unless things had really got corrupted, no internal member could betray the entire collaboration. With one exception.”

  “You?”

  “Yes. Me. I was the point of contact with the rest of the hierarchy. I not only belonged to a cell, but I organized the work for all our other researchers.”

  “Ah, no wonder you were scared!”

  Peter nodded. “I was the only one who knew how to contact everyone, and therefore, I was the only one who could have betrayed them all. After my narrow escape, I tracked down what had happened to the rest, and when I realized how widespread the betrayal was . . .”

  “You knew they were certain to blame you.”

  “Especially since I wasn’t picked up.”

  “Ah, but you were working. The higher-ups would have known that, and that at least would explain why you weren’t at home that morning.”

  He shook his head miserably. “We weren’t working,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “We weren’t working,” he repeated slightly louder.

&nb
sp; “I thought you said—”

  “I did. The truth is, we were warned off making that night’s contact. Allison’s husband wouldn’t have known the difference, but anyone higher up, after the fact, would have known there was nothing going on. I had absolutely no reason to be missing from my flat that night, none except an affair I had tried very hard to keep secret. Allison would have been the only one who knew that I had been walking her home, and she was dead, so I had no alibi. It would have been obvious I was the traitor.”

  “What about your contact, I mean, your boss? He’d know everyone.”

  “He worked through me. He was from another cell and leapfrogged me for a promotion. So, he knew his old comrades and he knew me and the people I worked with, but that was it.”

  “They promoted him over you? Did that make you bitter?” Marysia asked with something like suspicion.

  “No. I didn’t want his job, I wanted to stay with Allison, but unfortunately that wasn’t the reason for my being overlooked.”

  “What was?”

  “I don’t really know. Probably insubordination. In any case, they may well have thought I felt snubbed, and so my bosses may have thought I was bitter.”

  “And vengeful?”

  “They may have thought so. I didn’t tell the Council all this because it only complicated the picture and I felt the cards were stacked against me sufficiently as it was.”

  Marysia tilted her head with curiosity. “Tell me, is there anything else you kept from us?”

  Peter’s eyes strayed from Marysia’s face to the photographs she had mounted onher wall over a bookshelf. He rubbed his chin as he surveyed them: a picture of Marysia and her husband; another of her daughter, Olek’s mother; and another of her son, Adam. A phantom family, just like his, except that he did not even have photographs. He pulled his gaze away to look down at the table. After a long moment he answered her question: “Just some humiliations that I had no desire to relive.”

  Marysia blinked slowly as if carefully considering her next question, then she seemed to change her mind and said, “Well, if it wasn’t you, and it wasn’t anybody on the inside, then it must have been a leak from HQ.”