When the People Fell

by Cordwainer Smith

  The Secretary looked very surprised when he heard the translation.

  "Jokes, Mr. Prime Minister?"

  "Yes."

  "What kind of jokes?"

  "Jokes about apparatus."

  "Jokes about machinery don't sit very well," said the American.

  They went on talking back and forth as to whether it was a good idea to play practical jokes when each one had a serious job of espionage to do.

  The Russian leader insisted that he had no espionage, never heard of espionage, and that his espionage worked well enough so that he knew damn well that he didn't have any espionage.

  To this display of heat, the Secretary replied that he didn't have any espionage either and that we knew nothing whatever that occurred in Russia. Furthermore not only did we not know anything about Russia but we knew we didn't know it and we made sure of that. After this exchange both leaders parted, each one wondering what the other had been talking about.

  The whole matter was referred back to Washington. I was somewhere down on the list to see it.

  At that time I had "Galactic" clearance. Galactic clearance came a little bit after universal clearance. It wasn't very strong but it amounted to something. I was supposed to see those special papers in connection with my job of assisting Mr. Spatz in liaison. Actually it didn't do any good except to fill in the time when I wasn't working out budgets for him.

  The second lead came from some of the boys over in the Valley. We never called the place by any other name and we don't even like to see it in the federal budget. We know as much as we need to about it and then we stop thinking.

  It is much safer to stop thinking. It is not our business to think about what other people are doing, particularly if they are spending several million dollars of Uncle Sam's money every day, trying to find out what they think and most of the time ending up with nothing conclusive.

  Later we were to find out that the boys in the Valley had practically every security agent in the country rushing off to Minneapolis to look for a man named Angerhelm. Nelson Angerhelm.

  The name didn't mean anything then but before we got through it ended up as the largest story of the twentieth century. If they ever turn it loose it is going to be the biggest story in two thousand years.

  The third part of the story came along a little later.

  Colonel Plugg was over in G-2. He called up Mr. Spatz and he couldn't get Mr. Spatz so he called me.

  He said, "What's the matter with your boss? Isn't he ever in his room?"

  "Not if I can help it. I don't run him, he runs me. What do you want, Colonel?" I said.

  The colonel snarled.

  "Look, I am supposed to get money out of you for liaison purposes. I don't know how far I am going to have to go to liaise or if it is any of my business. I asked my old man what I ought to do about it and he doesn't know. Perhaps we ought to get out and just let the Intelligence boys handle it. Or we ought to send it to State. You spend half your life telling me whether I can have liaison or not and then giving me the money for it. Why don't you come on over and take a little responsibility for a change?"

  I rushed over to Plugg's office. It was an Army problem.

  These are the facts.

  The Soviet Assistant Military Attache, a certain Lieutenant Colonel Potariskov, asked for an interview. When he came over he brought nothing with him. This time he didn't even bring a translator. He spoke very funny English but it worked.

  The essence of Potariskov's story was that he didn't think it was very sporting of the American military to interfere in solemn weather reporting by introducing practical jokes in Soviet radar. If the American army didn't have anything else better to do would they please play jokes on each other but not on the Soviet forces?

  This didn't make much sense.

  Colonel Plugg tried to find out what the man was talking about. The Russian sounded crazy and kept talking about jokes.

  It finally turned out that Potariskov had a piece of paper in his pocket. He took it out and Plugg looked at it.

  On it there was an address. Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota.

  It turned out that Hopkins, Minnesota, was a suburb of Minneapolis. That didn't take long to find out.

  This meant nothing to Colonel Plugg and he asked if there was anything that Potariskov really wanted.

  Potariskov asked if the Colonel would confess to the Angerhelm joke.

  Potariskov said that in Intelligence they never tell you about the jokes they play with the Signal Corps. Plugg still insisted that he didn't know. He said he would try to find out and let Potariskov know later on. Potariskov went away.

  Plugg called up the Signal Corps, and by the time he got through calling he had a lead back into the Valley. The Valley people heard about it and they immediately sent a man over.

  It was about this time that I came in. He couldn't get hold of Mr. Spatz and there was real trouble.

  The point is that all three of them led together. The Valley people had picked up the name (and it is not up to me to tell you how they got hold of it). The name Angerhelm had been running all over the Soviet communications system. Practically every Russian official in the world had been asked if he knew anything about Nelson Angerhelm and almost every official, at least as far as the boys in the Valley could tell, had replied that he didn't know what it was all about.

  Some reference back to Mr. Khrushchev's conversation with the Secretary of State suggested that the Angerhelm inquiry might have tied in with this. We pursued it a little further. Angerhelm was apparently the right reference. The Valley people already had something about him. They had checked with the F.B.I.

  The F.B.I, had said that Nelson Angerhelm was a 62-year-old retired poultry farmer. He had served in World War I.

  His service had been rather brief. He had gotten as far as Plattsburg, New York, broken an ankle, stayed four months in a hospital, and the injury had developed complications. He had been drawing a Veterans Administration allowance ever since. He had never visited outside the United States, never joined a subversive organization, never married, and never spent a nickel. So far as the F.B.I, could discover, his life was not worth living.

  This left the matter up in the air. There was nothing whatever to connect him with the Soviet Union.

  It turned out that I wasn't needed after all. Spatz came into the office and said that a conference had been called for the whole Intelligence community, people from State were sitting in, and there was a special representative from OCBM from the White House to watch what they were doing.

  The question arose, "Who was Nelson Angerhelm? And what were we to do about him?"

  An additional report had been made out by an agent who specialized in pretending to be an Internal Revenue man.

  The "Internal Revenue agent" was one of the best people in the F.B.I, for checking on subversive activities. He was a real expert on espionage and he knew all about bad connections. He could smell a conspirator two miles off on a clear day. And by sitting in a room for a little while he could tell whether anybody had an illegal meeting there for the previous three years. Maybe I am exaggerating a little bit but I am not exaggerating much.

  This fellow, who was a real artist at smelling out Commies and anything that even faintly resembles a Commie, came back with a completely blank ticket on Angerhelm.

  There was only one connection that Angerhelm had with the larger world. He had a younger brother, whose name was Tice. Funny name and I don't know why he got it. Somebody told us later on that the full name tied in with Theiss Ankerhjelm, which was the name of a Swedish admiral a couple hundred years ago. Perhaps the family was proud of it.

  The younger brother was a West Pointer. He had had a regular career; that came easily enough out of the Adjutant General's Office.

  What did develop, though, was that the younger brother had died only two months previously. He too was a bachelor. One of the psychiatrists who got into the case said, "What a mother!" />
  Tice Angerhelm had traveled a great deal. He had something to do, as a matter of fact, with two or three of the projects that I was liaising on. There were all sorts of issues arising from this.

  However, he was dead. He had never worked directly on Soviet matters. He had no Soviet friends, had never been in the Soviet Union, and had never met Soviet forces. He had never even gone to the Soviet Embassy to an official reception.

  The man was no specialist, outside of Ordnance, a little tiny bit of French, and the missile program. He was something of a Saturday evening Don Juan. It was then time for the fourth stage.

  Colonel Plugg was told to get hold of Lieutenant Colonel Potariskov and find out what Potariskov had to give him. This time Potariskov called back and said that he would rather have his boss, the Soviet Ambassador himself, call on the Secretary or the Undersecretary of State.

  There was some shilly-shallying back and forth. The Secretary was out of town, the Undersecretary said he would be very glad to see the Soviet Ambassador if there were anything to ask about. He said that we had found Angerhelm, and if the Soviet authorities wanted to interview Mr. Angerhelm themselves they jolly well could go to Hopkins, Minnesota, and interview him.

  This led to a real flash of embarrassment when it was discovered that the area of Hopkins, Minnesota, was in the "no travel" zone proscribed to Soviet diplomats in retaliation against their "no travel" zones imposed on American diplomats in the Soviet Union.

  This was ironed out. The Soviet Ambassador was asked, would he like to go see a chicken farmer in Minnesota?

  When the Soviet Ambassador stated that he was not particularly interested in chicken farmers, but that he would be willing to see Mr. Angerhelm at a later date if the American government didn't mind, the whole thing was let go.

  Nothing happened at all. Presumably the Russians were relaying things back to Moscow by courier, letter, or whatever mysterious ways the Russians use when they are acting very deliberately and very solemnly.

  I heard nothing and certainly the people around the Soviet Embassy saw no unusual contacts at that time.

  Nelson Angerhelm hadn't come into the story yet. All he knew was that several odd characters had asked him about veterans that he scarcely knew, saying that they were looking for security clearances.

  And an Internal Revenue man had a long and very exhausting talk with him about his brother's estate. That didn't seem to leave much.

  Angerhelm went on feeding his chickens. He had television and Minneapolis has a pretty good range of stations. Now and then he showed up at the church; more frequently he showed up at the general store.

  He almost always went away from town to avoid the new shopping centers. He didn't like the way Hopkins had developed and preferred to go to the little country centers where they still have general stores. In its own funny way this seemed to be the only pleasure the old man had.

  After nineteen days, and I can now count almost every hour of them, the answer must have gotten back from Moscow. It was probably carried in by the stocky brown-haired courier who made the trip about every fortnight. One of the fellows from the Valley told me about that. I wasn't supposed to know and it didn't matter then.

  Apparently the Soviet Ambassador had been told to play the matter lightly. He called on the Undersecretary of State and ended up discussing world butter prices and the effect of American exports of ghee to Pakistan on the attempts of the Soviet Union to trade ghee for hemp.

  Apparently this was an extraordinary and confidential thing for the Soviet Ambassador to discuss. The Undersecretary would have been more impressed if he had been able to find out why the Soviet Ambassador just out of the top of his head announced that the Soviet Union had given about a hundred and twenty million dollars' credit to Pakistan for some unnecessary highways and was able to reply, therefore, somewhat tartly to the general effect that if the Soviet Union ever decided to stabilize world markets with the cooperation of the United States we would be very happy to cooperate. But this was no time to discuss money or fair business deals when they were dumping every piece of export rubbish they could in our general direction.

  It was characteristic of this Soviet Ambassador that he took the rebuff calmly. Apparently his mission was to have no mission. He left and that was all there was from him.

  Potariskov came back to the Pentagon, this time accompanied by a Russian civilian. The new man's English was a little more than perfect. The English was so good that it was desperately irritating.

  Potariskov himself looked like a rather horsey, brown-faced schoolboy, with chestnut hair and brown eyes. I got to see him because they had me sitting in the back of Plugg's office pretending just to wait for somebody else.

  The conversation was very simple. Potariskov brought out a recording tape. It was standard American tape.

  Plugg looked at it and said, "Do you want to play it right now?"

  Potariskov agreed.

  The stenographer got a tape recorder in. By that time three or four other officers wandered in and none of them happened to leave. As a matter of fact one of them wasn't even an officer but he happened to have a uniform on that very day.

  They played the tape and I listened to it. It was buzz, buzz, buzz. And there was some hissing, then it went clickety, clickety, clickety. Then it was buzz, buzz, buzz again. It was the kind of sound in which you turn on a radio and you don't even get static. You just get funny buzzing sounds which indicate that somebody has some sort of radio transmission somewhere but it is not consistent enough to be the loud whee, wheeeee kind of static which one often hears.

  All of us stood there rather solemnly. Plugg, thoroughly a soldier, listened at rigid attention, moving his eyes back and forth from the tape recorder to Potariskov's face. Potariskov looked at Plugg and then ran his eyes around the group.

  The little Russian civilian, who was as poisonous as a snake, glanced at every single one of us. He was obviously taking our measure and he was anxious to find out if any of us could hear anything he couldn't hear. None of us heard anything.

  At the end of the tape Plugg reached out to turn off the machine.

  "Don't stop it," Potariskov said.

  The other Russian interjected, "Didn't you hear it?"

  All of us shook our heads. We had heard nothing.

  With that, Potariskov said with singular politeness, "Please play it again."

  We played it again. Nothing happened, except for the buzzing and clicking.

  After the fifteen-minute point it was beginning to get pretty stale for some of us. One or two of the men actually wandered out. They happened to be the bona fide visitors. The non-bona fide visitors slouched down in the room.

  Colonel Plugg offered Potariskov a cigarette, which Potariskov took. They both smoked and we played it a third time. Then the third time Potariskov said, "Turn it off."

  "Didn't you hear it?" said Potariskov.

  "Hear what?" said Plugg.

  "Hear the name and the address."

  At that the funniest feeling came over me. I knew that I had heard something and I turned to the Colonel and said, "Funny, I don't know where I heard it or how I heard it but I do know something that I didn't know."

  "What is that?" said the little Russian civilian, his face lighting up.

  "Nelson," said I, intending to say, "Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota." Just as I had seen it in the "galactic" secret documents. Of course I didn't go any further. That was in the document and was very secret indeed. How should I know it?

  The Russian civilian looked at me. There was a funny, wicked, friendly, crooked sort of smile on his face. He said, "Didn't you hear 'Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota,' just now, and yet did you not know where you heard it?"

  The question then arose, "What had happened?"

  Potariskov spoke with singular candor. Even the Russian with him concurred.

  "We believe that this is a case of marginal perception. We have played this. T
his is obviously a copy. We have many such copies. We have played it to all our people. Nobody can even specify at what point he has heard it. We have had our best experts on it. Some put it at minute three. Others put it at minute twelve. Some put it at minute thirteen and a half and at different places. But different people under different controls all come out with the idea that they have heard 'Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota.' We have tried it on Chinese people."

  At that the Russian civilian interrupted. "Yes, indeed, they tried it on Chinese persons and even they heard the same thing, Nelson Angerhelm. Even when they do not know the language they hear 'Nelson Angerhelm.' Even when they know nothing else they hear that and they hear the street numbers. The numbers are always in English. They cannot make a recording. The recording is only of this noise and yet it comes out. What do you make of that?"

  What they said turned out to be true. We tried it also, after they went away.

  We tried it on college students, foreigners, psychiatrists, White House staff members, and passers-by. We even thought of running it on a municipal radio somewhere as a quiz show and offering prizes for anyone that got it. That was a little too heavy, so we accepted a much safer suggestion that we try it out on the public address system of the SAC base. The SAC was guarded night and day.

  No one happened to be getting much leave anyhow and it was easy enough to cut off the leave for an extra week. We played that damn thing six times over and almost everybody on that base wanted to write a letter to Nelson Angerhelm, 2322 Ridge Drive, Hopkins, Minnesota. They were even calling each other Angerhelm and wondering what the hell it meant.

  Naturally there were a great many puns on the name and even some jokes of a rather smutty order. That didn't help.

  The troublesome thing was that on all these different tests we too were unable to find out at what point the subliminal transmission of the name and address came.

  It was subliminal, all right. There's not much trick to that. Any good psychologist can pass along either a noise message or a sight message without the recipient knowing exactly when he got it. It is simply a matter of getting down near the threshold, running a little tiny bit under the threshold, and then making the message sharp and clear enough, just under the level of conscious notice, so that it slips on through.