The Union Club Mysteries

by Asimov, Isaac

  "Certainly, sir," he said with alacrity, descending briskly from the stool. "You are a noble fellow."

  Well, I am, of course, so I could see that drink had not yet incapacitated his judgment. We sat together at a corner table in a largely empty bar and he began talking at once. He heaved an enormous sigh and said, "I am a chemist. My name is Brooke. Simon Brooke. I received my doctorate from Wisconsin."

  "Good afternoon, Dr. Brooke," I said gravely. "I am Griswold."

  He said, "I worked with Lucas J. Atterbury. I assume you never heard of him."

  "I never did."

  "My own feeling is that he was probably the greatest biochemist in the world. He had no formal training in the field and I suspect he never even finished college, but he had a natural flair. Things turned to gold in his fingers as soon as he touched them. Do you know what I mean?"

  I knew what he meant.

  "You could go to college," said Brooke thoughtfully, "as I did and you would then know all the ways in which a problem could be studied and all the reasons why it couldn't be solved—and Lucas (he wouldn't let anyone call him by anything but his first name) who didn't know all those things would just sit in his chair and think and come up with something that would be just right.

  I said, "He must have been worth millions to anyone with problems."

  "You'd think so, wouldn't you? Well, that wasn't Lucas's way. He didn't want to solve just any problems that were handed to him, except once in a while just to earn some handsome fees that would keep him in funds and allow him to work on the one problem that interested him." "Which was?"

  "Immortality. He was seventy-seven when I met him and he had been working on that for seventeen years; ever since he was sixty and had decided that he had to do something to keep his life in existence past his normal life expectancy. By the time he was seventy-seven he was in the last stages of annoyance with himself. If he had started when he was fifty, you see, he could have solved the problem in time, but he hadn't felt the approach of old age till it was perhaps too late.

  "So, when he was seventy-seven, he was sufficiently desperate to hire an assistant. I was the assistant. It wasn't the sort of job I wanted, but he offered me a decent salary and I thought I could use it as a stepping-stone to something else. I sneered at him as an uneducated tinkerer at first—but he caught me. When he talked to me about his theories, he used all the wrong terminology, but eventually it seemed to make sense.

  "He thought that with me doing much of the experimentation, he might still make it before he died, so he kept me working hard. And the whole project became important to me.

  "You see—old age is programmed into our genes. There are inevitable changes that go on in the cells, changes that put an end to them finally. The changes clog them, stiffen them, disorder them. If you can find out exactly what the changes are and how to reverse them or, better yet, prevent them, we'd live for as long as we want to and stay young forever."

  I said, "If it's built into our cells, then old age and death must have a reason for existence and perhaps shouldn't be tampered with."

  "Of course there's a reason for it," said Brooke. "You can't have evolution without the periodic replacement of the old generation by the new. It's just that we don't need that anymore. Science is at the brink of being able to direct evolution.

  "In any case, Lucas had discovered what the crucial change was. He had found the chemical basis for old age and he was seeking for a way to reverse it, some chemical or physical treatment that would reverse that change. The treatment, properly administered, would be the fountain of youth."

  "How did you know he had discovered it?"

  "I have more than a statement. I was with him four years and in that time I had mice that showed the effects. I could inject an old mouse at his instructions, one that was clearly on the point of death from old age, and that mouse would take on the attributes of youth before my eyes."

  "Then it was all done."

  "Not quite. The mouse would grow young, frolic about in the joy of youth and then, after a day or two, it would die. There were clearly undesirable side effects to the treatment and Lucas had not, at first, managed to do away with them. That was his final task.—But he never gave me any details. I worked under instructions without ever knowing exactly what was happening. It was his mania for secrecy. He wanted everything under his control. So when the time came that he had solved the problem, it was too late."

  "In what way?"

  "On the day he had solved the problem, he was in his eighty-second year and he had a stroke. It was on that very day—the excitement I'm sure. He could barely talk and was clearly dying. When the doctors gave him a moment to himself, he motioned to me feebly. 'I have it,' he whispered with an articulation I could barely make out. 'Carry on. Preparations D-27, D-28. To be mixed but only after held overnight at—at—' His voice grew feebler. 'At forty degrees—'

  "I couldn't make out the final mumble, but I knew the only things that could come after 'forty degrees.' I said, 'Fahrenheit or Celsius.' He mumbled again and said, 'Do it today or it won't, won't—' I said again urgently, 'Fahrenheit or Celsius.' He mumbled again and said, 'Do it today or it won't, won't—' I said again urgently, and lapsed into a coma. He never came out of it and died the next day.

  "And there I was. I had two unstable solutions that would not last through the day. If I could mix them properly and inject myself—I was ready for the risk if it meant the chance of immortality—I could then live long enough to rediscover the secret for general use. Or at least I could stay young forever. But I didn't know the key point about the preparation—the temperature."

  "Is there much difference there?" I asked.

  "Certainly. A temperature of forty degrees Celsius is forty degrees above the Celsius freezing point at zero degrees. Every ten Celsius degrees is equal to eighteen Fahrenheit degrees so forty Celsius degrees above freezing is four times eighteen, or seventy-two Fahrenheit degrees above freezing. But the Fahrenheit freezing point is at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, and thirty-two plus seventy-two is one hundred and four. Therefore, forty degrees Celsius is equal to one hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit.

  "Now, then, did I use forty degrees Fahrenheit, which is quite cool or forty degrees Celsius, which is quite warm. Hot or cold? I didn't know. I couldn't make up my mind, so the two solutions lost their potency and I lost my chance forever.''

  I said, "Didn't you know which scale Lucas customarily used?"

  "Scientists use Celsius exclusively," said Brooke, "but Lucas wasn't really a trained scientist. He used whichever one appealed to him at the time. One could never be sure."

  "What did he mean, 'doesn't matter'?"

  "I don't know. He was dying. I assume he felt life slipping away and nothing mattered anymore. Damn it, why couldn't he have spoken a little more clearly. Imagine! The secret of immortality, and all of it lost in a mumble that didn't clearly distinguish between Fahrenheit and Celsius."

  Brooke, who was quite drunk now, didn't realize how bad it was, for of course the dying man's instructions were perfectly clear, as you have probably seen for yourselves.

  Griswold adjusted his position in his chair as though to drop off again, but Baranov seized his wrist and said, "Are you trying to tell me you know which temperature scale this Lucas was referring to?"

  "Of course," said Griswold, indignantly. "It's obvious. If you say 'forty degrees mumble, mumble' those mumbles don't have to be either 'Fahrenheit' or 'Celsius.' There's a third alternative."

  "Which?" I asked.

  "He could be saying 'forty degrees below zero.'"

  "Even if he did," said Jennings, "we still wouldn't know if it were Fahrenheit or Celsius."

  "Yes we would," said Griswold. "You've heard that forty Celsius degrees is equal to seventy-two Fahrenheit degrees. That means that forty Celsius degrees below zero degrees Celsius, which is the Celsius freezing point, is seventy-two degrees below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, which is the Fahrenheit freezi
ng point. But seventy-two degrees below the thirty-two-mark is forty degrees below zero degrees Fahrenheit.

  "Therefore, forty degrees below zero Celsius is forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. If you say 'forty degrees below zero,' it doesn't matter whether it's Celsius or Fahrenheit and that's the only temperature where it doesn't matter. That's why Lucas said, 'doesn't matter.'

  "Well, Brooke never saw that little point and I don't think that he has the brains to rediscover the treatment, or that anyone will in our lifetimes. So we'll just continue to grow old."

  To Contents

  The Thirteenth Page

  There was a rather despairing air about this particular evening at the Union Club. I had been glancing over the front page of the paper and tossed it to one side in disgust.

  Baranov said, reading my mind without difficulty, "There just isn't anything new to say or do about the hostage situation in Iran." He faded out, after having delivered himself of that useless comment.

  "I wish," said Jennings wistfully, "that we had withdrawn everyone at our embassy the week before the takeover. We should have. I imagine it was a failure of Intelligence that we didn't."

  "Fooey," I said. "Who needs spies and secret messages for an open-and-shut case like that. We knew the Iranian mood; we knew we were treating the Shah in New York. We should have—"

  Now at last Griswold opened one eye and glared at me. "Damn fool," he muttered. "If you don't know anything, why talk? There was no reason to expect a flagrant breach of international law like that when even the Nazis always behaved correctly in that respect. Then, too, you can't carry an evacuation through at a moment's notice. It would take time and careful preparation and if we went about it and the Iranian mob, very well orchestrated by the way, then took over, everyone would have said that the hostages were taken only because we had tried to evacuate the embassy. Of course, as Jennings said, our Intelligence capacity was not exactly utilized to capacity." Jennings smiled. "Then you admit that Intelligence can fail."

  "Certainly," said Griswold, lifting his scotch and soda to his lips and then wiping his white mustache delicately, "now that I've retired. There were failures even when I was active, under unusual circumstances, as when I wasn't called in soon enough. For instance—"

  I have always maintained [said Griswold] that it was the English language that allowed the Tet offensive to be such a surprise. Militarily, it was the turning point of the Vietnam war. It destroyed President Johnson politically; it broke the faith of the American people in victory; it made an eventual evacuation inevitable. And all because one person was proud of his knowledge of English and others wouldn't listen.

  You have to understand the difficulties that lie in the way of working with secret messages. Even if a message represents a true estimate of the situation and has safely been sent off, will it be intercepted? If it is not intercepted, will it be correctly interpreted? If it is correctly interpreted, will it be believed? Stalin's spies in Germany in early 1941 kept him perfectly up to date on Hitler's plans for an attack on the Soviet Union, for instance. Stalin simply refused to believe the reports.

  Then, too, the art of decoding messages has enforced such complexity upon the mechanics of cryptography that the weight of precaution can break down the process.

  For instance, there are some systems of cryptography that follow the solution to the puzzle of the perfect solvent, the material that is supposed to dissolve all substances. The problem in the case of such a solvent is: what do you use for a container?

  Actually there are two solutions. One is to saturate the perfect solvent with glass and when it can dissolve no more, you can safely use a glass container. What if you need pure solvent, however, without glass or anything else dissolved in it?

  In that case, you reason that the solvent must be formed in the first place, for no naturally occurring material is a perfect solvent. Therefore, you carry the formation through to the point where you have two substances which are each themselves unremarkable but which, on mixing, will give you the perfect solvent. You keep each in a separate container and when you are ready to use the perfect solvent, you add some of each component to the material you want dissolved. The perfect solvent forms at the site of use and dissolves the material.

  You see the analogy. In cryptography, you can send two messages, each of which is meaningless without the other. In that case, interception of one will be of no help to the enemy and of no harm to us. Interception even of both may not serve the enemy, if he doesn't appreciate the connection of the two. It also means that at least one of the messages does not have to be very obscure.

  Suppose a particular message cannot be decoded without a keyword, arbitrarily selected for the occasion, and that the keyword is sent separately by another route.

  If you want a keyword that is as little as ten letters long, then the number of possibilities of ten-letter combinations based on the twenty-six letters of the alphabet is almost exactly a million billion. Nobody's going to guess that combination by luck, and no one can possibly think of using force and of trying every possible combination one at a time.

  How do you decide on the keyword? One way—not the only way—is to have an agreed-on book (one that is changed periodically) and choose a ten-letter combination at random out of it. You then use a small coding machine to code the message around the keyword and send the keyword itself separately. The keyword can be and sometimes is just a scrawled notation such as 73/12 indicating page 73, line 12. Look up the page and line of the book of the week and the first ten letters, or the last ten letters, or whatever you've agreed on is the key.

  Either message might, for some reason, not arrive, but it is in the highest degree frustrating if both messages arrive and yet, even taken together, make no sense. Something of that sort happened in January 1968, and it was fatal.

  Here are the essential details. A message came through to Saigon headquarters from an operative in Hue. The agent who sent it was the best we had. He was a Vietnamese, heart and soul on our side, and with an excellent command of English that he ordinarily took care to hide. He actually operated with the Vietcong, so you can imagine the risks he ran.

  He kept his coding machine well hidden, of course, and the books he used for determining the keyword. They were British paperback thrillers in rotation, and it was his choice. He liked them. They were literate and he ceaselessly polished his English on them. He was proud of his facility with the language—all this turned up afterward, too late—and on those occasions when he met with our men, he would trot out his full vocabulary, and go out of his way to demonstrate his knowledgability on the matter of synonyms, idioms, ambiguities and so on. Our men, being native to the language, didn't know it nearly as well and, I imagine, listened with impatience or, I strongly suspect, didn't listen at all—a terrible mistake.

  The key arrived and seemed perfectly clear. Stripped of the red herrings with which it was routinely surrounded, it read "13 THP/2NDL" which was interpreted, quite reasonably, as the thirteenth page and second line. That was turned to in the book, the first ten letters taken, and fed into the computer. The message was then inserted and what came out was garblement, absolute chaos and meaninglessness.

  They were astonished, and I imagine they tried it several times before being satisfied that something was wrong. They decided that, through some error, the agent had used the wrong book. They sent a message back to Hue in order to get a confirmation. That meant the loss of time. When they got back nothing, they sent an army officer and I suppose you can imagine what he found.

  The agent had disappeared the morning after the message had been sent out. He has never been heard of again as far as I know, so that we can assume the Vietcong finally discovered the game he had been playing. As I said, it was January 1968, and considering what was about to happen, the enemy must have been highly sensitive to all sorts of things.

  Well, then, what to do with the message? It didn't work and it wasn't ever going to work. The people at Saigon w
ere quite convinced on that point.

  They were therefore faced with two alternatives. The first was simply to ignore it. If a message were intercepted and you never received it, there was nothing to be done, and operationally this fell into the same category. It might just as well never have been received.

  However, it was received. The receipt was on record. And if it carried an important communication—as, in point of fact, it did, though no one knew it at the time— someone would have to be blamed, and whoever made the decision to ignore the matter would be the candidate. The people at Saigon had a healthy resistance to the notion of being scapegoated, and looked for a second alternative.

  They found one. One of the operatives had a month's leave coming and had in any case intended to whoop it up in the United States for a while. He went, took the message with him, and brought it to Washington. Carefully, he placed it in the lap of the Department and it was their baby now.

  The Department was as helpless as the Saigon people were. They brooded over it, discussed it, dared not throw it away lest it be their butt in a sling—and they, unlike the Saigon people, had no one to whom to pass the buck.

  Two entire weeks passed before someone finally took the chance of saying, "Let's ask Griswold!"

  I can understand the hesitation. They knew my opinion of the Vietnam war and they had the definite feeling I wasn't to be trusted in matters relating to it. But now they had nowhere else to turn. If they had only understood that as little as three days before.

  They found me, brought me in, and put the entire case before me. What they wanted me to say was that in my expert opinion they might as well consider it a garbled message; that you can't get something out of nothing; and to forget it. Then, if the worst came to the worst, it would be my skin that would be separated from my body.