The Union Club Mysteries

by Asimov, Isaac

  But there had to be some way.

  I talked politics and sports with him and he knew as much as I did about them. I tried all kinds of idioms and slang expressions on him and they never fazed him.

  Fortunately, we were both involved with reflux condensations on our desks, which gave us plenty of time to talk. Besides, in civil service jobs, undue attention to one's work is considered highly suspicious, especially in wartime.

  I suggested word games, therefore, and we played a few harmless ones, and then by easy stages we got to free association. I told him that I would bet that no matter how he tried to mask the fact, I could by free associations tell him the last time he had been to bed with a girl friend and exactly what they had done. We had a five-dollar bet on it and an additional five dollars he wouldn't answer each word or phrase within five seconds by my watch.

  It was 4:20 p.m. when we started and you can bet we were both serious. We were fighting for victory in war and for ten dollars, and both of us thought a lot of ten dollars.

  I said "table" and he said "bed"; I said "DiMaggio" and he said "homerun"; I said "G.I." and he said "Joe"; I said "clarinet" and he said "Benny Goodman." It went on like that for quite a while, with me slowly getting more complicated by delicate little stages.

  Finally at 4:45 p.m. I said "terror of flight" and he said "gloom of the grave" and I gave an agreed-upon signal and a fellow sitting at a desk at the other end of the room stood up, walked over, collared the guy and took off. He kept yelling "You owe me ten bucks" all the way out, but I can tell you he had a fat chance of collecting.

  From what I told you, I suppose you can see what happened, so if you don't mind, I'll just catch up on the remaining twenty of my forty winks.

  We had to wake him. "What happened?" I said, shaking him rather roughly, so that he was hard put to it to hold his scotch and soda steady "Finish the damn story."

  "You mean you don't get it?" he said indignantly. 'Terror of flight' is from the third stanza of 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' which goes:

  And where is that band who so vauntingly swore

  That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion a home and a country should leave us no more? Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave: And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

  "Well, damn it, gentlemen, no loyal, true-blue American knows the words of the first stanza of our glorious national anthem, and they've never even heard of the third stanza (except for me, of course, since I know everything). In any case, the third stanza is chauvinist and bloody-minded and it was practically read out of the anthem during the great peace-loving days of World War II.

  "It's just that the Germans are so thorough they carefully taught their agents all four verses of the anthem and made sure they had them down letter-perfect—and that was the dead giveaway.

  "The only trouble was that the commander never did give me my raise and they didn't even reimburse me for the ten-dollar bet I lost."

  I said, "But you never paid the ten dollars."

  "Yes," said Griswold, "but they didn't know that." And he fell asleep again.

  To Contents

  The Telephone Number

  "I'm a corporation now," said Jennings, with a kind of dubious pride, "but what it means is that I've got an employer's identification number now that I must remember. That's on top of my social security number and telephone number and zip code and my car's license plate."

  "And your address, and the combination of any combination lock you might have," said Baranov even more gloomily, "and the birthdays and anniversaries of all your relatives and friends. We're prisoners of a numbered society."

  "That," said I, "is the reason why we need to be computerized. Feed all the numbers into a computer and let it do the worrying."

  At which Griswold stirred. His chair creaked defiantly as he leaned forward, puffed out his white mustache, and stared at us balefully.

  "I'm not much good at remembering numbers," he said, "but I knew a man once who never forgot one."

  He paused to sip at the scotch and soda he seems always to be holding, but there was no danger we would get away. There's something in the way Griswold looks at you through vaguely bloodshot eyes that forces you into a verbal paralysis.

  His name was Bulmerson [said Griswold] and those were the days when we were holed up in a little room at the Pentagon, which nobody could find except Bulmerson and me, and two or three others who worked with us.

  8 There was a sort of shabby linen-closet look about the room and it had a sign on the door that had nothing to do with what went on inside. I doubt that there were five men outside our group who knew what we were up to, and that goes even for the upper-echelon Pentagon personnel.

  I remember an admiral once wandering in under the impression he was visiting a men's room. He kept looking vaguely around for the urinals as though he were sure we had one of them hidden in the lockers. We had to lead him out gently.

  What was going on, of course, was intelligence. Not James Bond heroics. Infinitely duller. Infinitely more important. It was just a matter of weighing information and deciding whether it was reliable or not, and just how one piece of news fit with another, and to what degree it was possible that someone who said "yes" really meant "no" or vice versa.

  After doing all that we had to be ready to advise the President or the State Department and sweat out the result. We earned our money, actually—not that we were paid very much.

  Bulmerson had been at it longest. A big man, broad, white hair, always very red in the face, thick neck and bulging at every seam. Looked as though he should be smoking a cigar, but he didn't.

  It was he who never forgot a number. He knew the telephone number of a thousand officials and ten thousand nonofficials and never got them wrong. He could manage other kinds of numbers as well, but telephone numbers were his particular hobby. I think his secret ambition was to replace the telephone book.

  It might have been that little quirk in his head that made it possible for him to have the sixth sense for telling when some foreign statesman had broken down and forgetfully said something that wasn't a lie. Who knows how odd talents fit together. Maybe it was his number sense that somehow made him an infallible spotter of the infrequent truth, and that was always valuable. He was much looked up to, was Bulmerson. Then, too, all sorts of raw data came to us. Any anonymous phone tip was routed to us. We don't know the motives that make people report to us. We just make use of it—if we dare. Sometimes the bits we get are from harmless lunatics and sometimes from enemy agents who are making a definite attempt to mislead us. Winnowing out the ounce of wheat from the ton of chaff is another one of our jobs.

  We had one informer who was infallible, though. He had found us, for one thing, and that was impressive. He called us directly and we never found out how he had discovered how to reach us. He was always right.

  We never found out who he was, though. His voice was soft and hoarse and seemed vaguely non-American. We called him Our Boy. If it had happened a dozen years later we might have called him Deep Throat. This was in the early 1960s, however.

  We made no attempt to locate him or identify him, because we feared that anything we did might stop him and we didn't want him stopped. He was our keyhole into the Kremlin. After 1965, we never heard from him again. He may have been shifted out of the country or he might have died—even naturally, for all we know. But this was a couple of years earlier.

  He called, but it was always in a special way. First someone else would call and give us a telephone number and time limits. If we used that telephone number at the particular time, we got him. We had a little code phrase to identify each other, and then he would talk for a minute or two and hang up. We always acted on what he said and we were never sorry we did.

  The numbers were always pay phones (we did check that much), but we
didn't know what system he used to pick them out, for, of course, he never used the same one twice. For that matter, he never seemed to use the same person twice for making the initial call. We don't know how he picked them. They may have been winos he bought for a bottle for the one job. You can't smell their breath over the telephone.

  Bulmerson always enjoyed it when he happened to pick up the telephone at the time when the message was a telephone number and a time from Our Boy. The rest of us had to scribble the number down and sometimes even say, "Would you repeat that, please?"

  In that case, Bulmerson would be insufferable the rest of the day, and comment on premature senility. He was very childish about it.

  Of course, when he answered the phone, he just listened and then hung up without saying a word. Then, when the time came, he would just call, having made no note but having filed the number in his capacious and infallible number memory.

  It was just two months before the assassination of President Kennedy—

  I was in the office with Bulmerson, who wasn't looking particularly well, and with two others— What were their names? I don't remember, but it doesn't matter. Call them Smith and Jones.

  It was a muggy day, overcast and gloomy, not at all comfortable even though it was just about the autumnal equinox that supposedly ends summer. In the Washington area, summer doesn't end as neatly as that, or on time.

  Bulmerson was scowling because he said the lousy sandwich he'd had for lunch had left him with heartburn, and that didn't strike me as odd considering the trouble we were having in Vietnam.

  Ngo Dinh Diem was running South Vietnam pretty much to suit himself, and his way of doing so wasn't suiting us. He was growing increasingly unpopular and Buddhist monks were burning themselves alive in protest, which they were not doing in North Vietnam and which made our side look like the villains. What's more, the number of American "advisers" was rising steadily and had passed the ten-thousand mark.

  It was clear, at least to the little group of us whose job it was to study the world of international politics, that we were being suckered into a booby trap, but it didn't seem as if there were anything that could be done about it. We couldn't leave and make it look as though we were abandoning an ally, and the Democrats, in particular, would have been skinned alive if they had— But you all know the story—

  What we needed was some way of getting a clean-cut, fairly bloodless, and quick—especially quick—victory, and get out. What happened afterward, well, at least it would happen without Americans in the middle of it. Trouble was we didn't have that way.

  Then, on the day I'm talking about, the telephone rang and it was Bulmerson, scowling, who picked it up.

  "Adamson's Five and Ten," he said, that being the code phrase of the day.

  He listened expressionlessly, then hung up the telephone without saying a word.

  He turned to us, gasping a little, and said, "Our Boy wants to talk to us and it's got to be in thirty minutes, between 2:30 p.m. and 2:35, and it's double-Z."

  That was the term Our Boy used when it was highest possible priority. The last time he had used it was during the Cuban missile crisis the previous year, and it had meant we went into it knowing we would win, which was very convenient—and another story.

  I said, "Don't forget the telephone number."

  A look of contempt crossed Bulmerson's sweating face. "Are you kidding? It's so simple it's no fun to remember it. Even you could remember it. At least today you could. I'll even tell you what it is and you'll see. It's 9—"

  That's all he said, because he then made a sound that was half gasp, half groan, clutched at his chest and fell to the ground, where he twisted and twitched. That was no heartburn he had been suffering from: it was a coronary and a bad one.

  There was nothing we could do except ring Emergency.

  I'll say this for the Pentagon. They had a team there in five minutes and the paramedics worked on him for a while, then heaved him into a stretcher and carted him off. It didn't do much good; the poor man died in the hospital that evening. We remained behind, shocked and stunned, after Bulmerson had been taken away. It's hard to get your bearings when something like that happens.

  But then Smith nudged me. He looked pasty white and it wasn't from what he had just seen. He said to me, "Bulmerson never told us the telephone number."

  We had to think about that. In our business, it's first things first.

  I looked at the clock. It was 2:31 and we had four minutes to go. "Don't worry about it," I said. "He told us enough."

  I called and got Our Boy. What he had to say was what we had been waiting to hear. There was a way of getting the Chinese People's Republic into a neat corner. It would take time, but if we played our part correctly, North Vietnam would be unable to move, and we would have the perfect excuse to call it a victory and get out of South Vietnam.

  Happy ending—except that things broke wrong. On November 1, Diem was killed in a coup and on November 22, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and by the time we had the government working again, the chance had passed and there was no way out. Johnson had to keep raising the ante and raising, and, in the end—well, you know the end.

  And since I expect you know what the telephone number was, that's the end of the story.

  Griswold was closing his eyes, but all three of us were at him simultaneously. Baranov said, "What was the telephone number, and how did you know?"

  Griswold raised his white eyebrows. "But it's obvious. Bulmerson said it was an easy number to remember and had time to give the first digit as 9. That meant it could be 999-9999 or 987-6543, which would be the limit he would expect us to be able to keep in mind. He said, however, 'At least today you could.' That made the day special, and what can possibly make a day special in connection with a number but its date.

  "I told you it was two months before the assassination, which was on November 22, so the date was September 22, or, if you wish, 22 September. September is the ninth month, so the day can be written 9-22, or 22-9. Bulmerson said the first digit was 9 so, if you forget the hyphen, it was 922. If you remember the year of the assassination, you know the date was 922-1963 and that was the number I dialed."

  To Contents

  The Men Who Wouldn't Talk

  "It always puzzled me," said Baranov one night at the Union Club "why, in war, one doesn't strike for the top. Why fight the armies, instead of the man who inspires and leads them. If Napoleon had died early in the game, or Lenin, or Hitler, or, for that matter, Washington—"

  Jennings said, "I suppose it's partly a matter of tight security and partly the freemasonry of command. If the leader of government A orders a strike at the leader of government B, he's asking for it himself, isn't he?"

  I said, "I think that's over romantic. My feeling is that if a leader dies, someone takes his place who may be even more effective. Philip of Macedon was knocked off before he could invade Persia, but who took his place? His son, who turned out to be Alexander the Great."

  Griswold, as usual, was drowsing with his scotch and soda in his hand and, also as usual, managed to hear us just the same. He opened one eye and said, "Sometimes you don't know who the leaders are. Then what do you do?" He opened the other eye and stared at us from under his shaggy eyebrows.

  George Plumb [said Griswold] was a penologist who had an interesting theory on the subject of prison management. The problem, he said, was that American prisons fell between two extremes, and uncomfortably so.

  Many elements of American society feel prisoners should be treated humanely, with an eye to rehabilitation rather than torture, Many other elements in society feel that prisoners are behind bars in order to be punished and that imprisonment is not, in itself, punishment enough.

  The result is an uneasy compromise in that prisoners are generally not treated well enough to keep them from feeling a rising resentment, and, on the other hand, are not treated so badly as to be starved and beaten into helpless compliance. The result is occasional prison
riots—as we all know.

  Given all this, my friend, Plumb pointed out that riots do not occur predictably. If you follow the misery or cruelty inflicted upon prisoners, you do not find that at a certain level, a riot breaks out. In one prison, quite abysmal conditions are endured with nothing more than growls, mutters and an occasional clash of aluminum mugs against iron bars. In other prisons, where conditions are substantially less intolerable, a fierce insurrection will break out.

  Plumb insisted it was a matter of leadership. If, in a particular prison there were a prisoner skilled enough or charismatic enough, he could direct the strategy and tactics of a revolt and might even deliberately stir one up where none would otherwise take place.

  One must, therefore, Plumb would say, learn to recognize the leader, the man who is clearly respected, or admired, or feared by the prisoners generally and, while matters are as yet quiet, transfer him to another prison. The prison which he has left then remains quiet because the prisoners are without a head and it will take time for another to arise. The prison which he enters does not know him and it will take time for him to rise to a position of leadership.

  Plumb's advice was taken on a number of occasions and, if the transfer were followed by at least some improvement in prisoner treatment, riots were invariably aborted.

  Some years ago, at one particular prison—it wouldn't be wise to mention its name—conditions for a riot seemed to be mounting. The prison guards reported a dangerous restlessness among the inmates, a clear spirit of rebellion.

  Plumb was called in and, of course, his first question was for the name of the prisoners' leader. He was astonished when the prison officials, from the warden down, professed complete ignorance on the subject. There was no one prisoner who was clearly at the head.

  "There must be one," said Plumb. "A mob doesn't move by general consent. Someone has to shout, 'What are we waiting for? Let's go!'"