“That’s interesting,” Sir Neville Lawton commented. “How so?”
“Well, you know what happens when a photon comes in contact with the atomic structure of matter,” Kato said. “There may be an elastic collision, in which the photon merely bounces off. Macroscopically, that’s the effect we call reflection of light. Or there may be an inelastic collision, when the photon hits an atom and knocks out an electron—the old photoelectric effect. Or, the photon may be retained for a while and emitted again relatively unchanged—the effect observed in luminous paint. Or, the photon may penetrate, undergo a change to a neutrino, and either remain in the nucleus of the atom or pass through it, depending upon a number of factors. All this, of course, is old stuff; even the photon-neutrino interchange has been known since the mid-’50s, when the Gamow neutrino-counter was developed. But now we come to what you have been so good as to christen the Sugihara Effect—the neutrino picking up a negative charge and, in effect, turning into an electron, and then losing its charge, turning back into a neutrino, and then, as in the case of metal heated to incandescence, being emitted again as a photon.
“At first, we thought this had no connection with the spaceship insulation problem we are under contract to work out, and we agreed to keep this effect a Team secret until we could find out if it had commercial possibilities. But now, I find that it has a direct connection with the collapsed-matter problem. When the electron loses its negative charge and reverts to a neutrino, there is a definite accretion of interatomic binding-force, and the molecule, or the crystalline lattice or whatever tends to contract, and when the neutrino becomes a photon, the nucleus of the atom contracts.”
* * * *
Heym ben-Hillel was sitting oblivious to everything but his young colleague’s words, a slice of the flesh of the unclean beast impaled on his fork and halfway to his mouth.
“Yes! Certainly!” he exclaimed. “That would explain so many things I have wondered about: And of course, there are other forces at work which, in the course of nature, balance that effect—”
“But can the process be controlled?” Suzanne Maillard wanted to know. “Can you convert electrons to neutrinos and then to photons in sufficient numbers, and eliminate other effects that would cause compensating atomic and molecular expansion?”
Kato grinned, like a tomcat contemplating the bones of a fish he has just eaten.
“Yes, I can. I have.” He turned to MacLeod. “Remember those bullets I got from you?” he asked.
MacLeod nodded. He handloaded for his .38-special, and like all advanced cases of handloading-fever, he was religiously fanatical about uniformity of bullet weights and dimensions. Unlike most handloaders, he had available the instruments to secure such uniformity.
“Those bullets are as nearly alike as different objects can be,” Kato said. “They weigh 158 grains, and that means one-five-eight-point-zero-zero-zero-practically-nothing. The diameter is .35903 inches. All right; I’ve been subjecting those bullets to different radiation-bombardments, and the best results have given me a bullet with a diameter of .35892 inches, and the weight is unchanged. In other words, there’s been no loss of mass, but the mass had contracted. And that’s only been the first test.”
“Well, write up everything you have on it, and we’ll lay out further experimental work,” MacLeod said. He glanced around the table. “So far, we can’t be entirely sure. The shrinkage may be all in the crystalline lattice: the atomic structure may be unchanged. What we need is matter that is really collapsed.”
“I’ll do that,” Kato said. “Barida, I’ll have all my data available for you before noon tomorrow: you can make up copies for all Team members.”
“Make mine on microfilm, for projection,” von Heldenfeld said.
“Mine, too,” Sir Neville Lawton added.
“Better make microfilm copies for everybody,” Heym ben-Hillel suggested. “They’re handier than type-script.”
MacLeod rose silently and tiptoed around behind his wife and Rudolf von Heldenfeld, to touch Kato Sugihara on the shoulder.
“Come on outside, Kato,” he whispered. “I want to talk to you.”
* * * *
The Japanese nodded and rose, following him outside onto the roof above the laboratories. They walked over to the edge and stopped at the balustrade.
“Kato, when you write up your stuff, I want you to falsify everything you can. Put it in such form that the data will be absolutely worthless, but also in such form that nobody, not even Team members, will know it has been falsified. Can you do that?”
Kato’s almond-shaped eyes widened. “Of course I can, Dunc,” he replied. “But why—?”
“I hate to say this, but we have a traitor in the Team. One of those people back in the dining room is selling us out to the Fourth Komintern. I know it’s not Karen, and I know it’s not you, and that’s as much as I do know, now.”
The Japanese sucked in his breath in a sharp hiss. “You wouldn’t say that unless you were sure, Dunc,” he said.
“No. At about 1000 this morning, Dr. Weissberg, the civilian director, called me to his office. I found him very much upset. He told me that General Nayland is accusing us—by which he meant this Team—of furnishing secret information on our subproject to Komintern agents. He said that British Intelligence agents at Smolensk had learned that the Red Triumph laboratories there were working along lines of research originated at MacLeod Team Center here. They relayed the information to Western Union Central Intelligence, and WU passed it on to United States Central Intelligence, and now Counter Espionage is riding Nayland about it, and he’s trying to make us the goat.”
“He would love to get some of us shot,” Kato said. “And that could happen. They took a long time getting tough about espionage in this country, but when Americans get tough about something, they get tough right. But look here; we handed in our progress-reports to Felix Weissberg, and he passed them on to Nayland. Couldn’t the leak be right in Nayland’s own HQ?”
“That’s what I thought, at first,” MacLeod replied. “Just wishful thinking, though. Fact is, I went up to Nayland’s HQ and had it out with him; accused him of just that. I think I threw enough of a scare into him to hold him for a couple of days. I wanted to know just what it was the Komintern was supposed to have got from us, but he wouldn’t tell me. That, of course, was classified-stuff.”
“Well?”
“Well then, Karen and I got our digestive tracts emptied and went in to town, where I could use a phone that didn’t go through a military switch-board, and I put through a call to Allan Hartley, President Hartley’s son. He owes us a break, after the work we did in Puerto Rico. I told him all I wanted was some information to help clear ourselves, and he told me to wait a half an hour and then call Counter Espionage Office in Washington and talk to General Hammond.”
“Ha! If Allan Hartley’s for us, what are we worried about?” Kato asked. “I always knew he was the power back of Associated Enterprises and his father was the front-man: I’ll bet it’s the same with the Government.”
“Allan Hartley’s for us as long as our nose is clean. If we let it get dirty, we get it bloodied, too. We have to clean it ourselves,” MacLeod told him. “But here’s what Hammond gave me: The Komintern knows all about our collapsed-matter experiments with zinc, titanium and nickel. They know about our theoretical work on cosmic rays, including Suzanne’s work up to about a month ago. They know about that effect Sir Neville and Heym discovered two months ago.” He paused. “And they know about the photon-neutrino-electron interchange.”
Kato responded to this with a gruesome double-take that gave his face the fleeting appearance of an ancient samurai war mask.
“That wasn’t included in any report we ever made,” he said. “You’re right: the leak comes from inside the Team. It must be Sir Neville, or Suzanne, or Heym ben-Hillel, or Adam Lowiewski, or Rudolf von Heldenfeld, or—No! No, I can’t believe it could be Farida!” He looked at MacLeod pleadingly. “You do
n’t think she could have—?”
“No, Kato. The Team’s her whole life, even more than it is mine. She came with us when she was only twelve, and grew up with us. She doesn’t know any other life than this, and wouldn’t want any other. It has to be one of the other five.”
“Well, there’s Suzanne,” Kato began. “She had to clear out of France because of political activities, after the collapse of the Fourth Republic and the establishment of the Rightist Directoire in ’57. And she worked with Joliot-Curie, and she was at the University of Louvain in the early ’50s, when that place was crawling with Commies.”
“And that brings us to Sir Neville,” MacLeod added. “He dabbles in spiritualism; he and Suzanne do planchette-seances. A planchette can be manipulated. Maybe Suzanne produced a communication advising Sir Neville to help the Komintern.”
“Could be. Then, how about Lowiewski? He’s a Pole who can’t go back to Poland, and Poland’s a Komintern country.” Kato pointed out. “Maybe he’d sell us out for amnesty, though why he’d want to go back there, the way things are now—?”
“His vanity. You know, missionary-school native going back to the village wearing real pants, to show off to the savages. Used to be a standing joke, down where I came from.” MacLeod thought for a moment. “And Rudolf: he’s always had a poor view of the democratic system of government. He might feel more at home with the Komintern. Of course, the Ruskis killed his parents in 1945—”
“So what?” Kato retorted. “The Americans killed my father in 1942, but I’m not making an issue out of it. That was another war; Japan’s a Western Union country, now. So’s Germany——How about Heym, by the way? Remember when the Komintern wanted us to come to Russia and do the same work we’re doing here?”
“I remember that after we turned them down, somebody tried to kidnap Karen,” MacLeod said grimly. “I remember a couple of Russians got rather suddenly dead trying it, too.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking of our round-table argument when the proposition was considered. Heym was in favor of accepting. Now that, I would say, indicates either Communist sympathies or an overtrusting nature,” Kato submitted. “And a lot of grade-A traitors have been made out of people with trusting natures.”
MacLeod got out his pipe and lit it. For a long time, he stared out across the mountain-ringed vista of sagebrush, dotted at wide intervals with the bulks of research-centers and the red roofs of the villages.
“Kato, I think I know how we’re going to find out which one it is,” he said. “First of all, you write up your data, and falsify it so that it won’t do any damage if it gets into Komintern hands. And then—”
* * * *
The next day started in an atmosphere of suppressed excitement and anxiety, which, beginning with MacLeod and Karen and Kato Sugihara, seemed to communicate itself by contagion to everybody in the MacLeod Team’s laboratories. The top researchers and their immediate assistants and students were the first to catch it; they ascribed the tension under which their leader and his wife and the Japanese labored to the recent developments in the collapsed-matter problem. Then, there were about a dozen implicitly-trusted technicians and guards, who had been secretly gathered in MacLeod’s office the night before and informed of the crisis that had arisen. Their associates could not miss the fact that they were preoccupied with something unusual.
They were a variegated crew; men who had been added to the Team in every corner of the world. There was Ahmed Abd-el-Rahman, the Arab jeep-driver who had joined them in Basra. There was the wiry little Greek whom everybody called Alex Unpronounceable. There was an Italian, and two Chinese, and a cashiered French Air Force officer, and a Malay, and the son of an English earl who insisted that his name was Bertie Wooster. They had sworn themselves to secrecy, had heard MacLeod’s story with a polylingual burst of pious or blasphemous exclamations, and then they had scattered, each to the work assigned him.
MacLeod had risen early and submitted to the ordeal of the search to leave the reservation and go to town again, this time for a conference at the shabby back-street cigar store that concealed a Counter Espionage center. He had returned just as Farida Khouroglu was finishing the microfilm copies of Kato’s ingeniously-concocted pseudo-data. These copies were distributed at noon, while the Team was lunching, along with carbons of the original type-script.
He was the first to leave the table, going directly to the basement, where Alex Unpronounceable and the man who had got his alias from the works of P. G. Wodehouse were listening in on the telephone calls going in and out through the Team-center switch-board, and making recordings. For two hours, MacLeod remained with them. He heard Suzanne Maillard and some woman who was talking from a number in the Army married-officers’ settlement making arrangements about a party. He heard Rudolf von Heldenfeld make a date with some girl. He listened to a violent altercation between the Team chef and somebody at Army Quartermaster’s HQ about the quality of a lot of dressed chicken. He listened to a call that came in for Adam Lowiewski, the mathematician.
“This is Joe,” the caller said. “I’ve got to go to town late this afternoon, but I was wondering if you’d have time to meet me at the Recreation House at Oppenheimer Village for a game of chess. I’m calling from there, now.”
“Fine; I can make it,” Lowiewski’s voice replied. “I’m in the middle of a devil’s own mathematical problem; maybe a game of chess would clear my head. I have a new queen’s-knight gambit I want to try on you, anyhow.”
Bertie Wooster looked up sharply. “Now there; that may be what we’re—”
The telephone beside MacLeod rang. He scooped it up; named himself into it.
It was Ahmed Abd-el-Rahman. “Look, chief; I tail this guy to Oppenheimer Village,” the Arab, who had learned English from American movies, answered. “He goes into the rec-joint. I slide in after him, an’ he ain’t in sight. I’m lookin’ around for him, see, when he comes bargin’ outa the Don Ameche box. Then he grabs a table an’ a beer. What next?”
“Stay there; keep an eye on him,” MacLeod told him. “If I want you, I’ll call.”
MacLeod hung up and straightened, feeling under his packet for his .38-special.
“That’s it, boys,” he said. “Lowiewski. Come on.”
“Hah!” Alex Unpronounceable had his gun out and was checking the cylinder. He spoke briefly in description of the Polish mathematician’s ancestry, physical characteristics, and probable post-mortem destination. Then he put the gun away, and the three men left the basement.
* * * *
For minutes that seamed like hours, MacLeod and the Greek waited on the main floor, where they could watch both the elevators and the stairway. Bertie Wooster had gone up to alert Kato Sugihara and Karen. Then the door of one of the elevators opened and Adam Lowiewski emerged, with Kato behind him, apparently lost in a bulky scientific journal he was reading. The Greek moved in from one side, and MacLeod stepped in front of the Pole.
“Hi, Adam,” he greeted. “Have you looked into that batch of data yet?”
“Oh, yes. Yes.” Lowiewski seemed barely able to keep his impatience within the bounds of politeness. “Of course, it’s out of my line, but the mathematics seems sound.” He started to move away.
“You’re not going anywhere,” MacLeod told him. “The chess game is over. The red pawns are taken—the one at Oppenheimer Village, and the one here.”
There was a split second in which Lowiewski struggled—almost successfully—to erase the consternation from his face.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he began. His right hand started to slide under his left coat lapel.
MacLeod’s Colt was covering him before he could complete the movement. At the same time, Kato Sugihara dropped the paper-bound periodical, revealing the thin-bladed knife he had concealed under it. He stepped forward, pressing the point of the weapon against the Pole’s side. With the other hand, he reached across Lowiewski’s chest and jerked the pistol from his s
houlder-holster. It was one of the elegant little .32 Beretta 1954 Model automatics.
“Into the elevator,” MacLeod ordered. An increasing pressure of Kato’s knife emphasized the order. “And watch him; don’t let him get rid of anything,” he added to the Greek.
“If you would explain this outrage—” Lowiewski began. “I assume it is your idea of a joke—”
Without even replying, MacLeod slammed the doors and started the elevator upward, letting it rise six floors to the living quarters. Karen Hilquist and the aristocratic black-sheep who called himself Bertie Wooster were waiting when he opened the door. The Englishman took one of Lowiewski’s arms; MacLeod took the other. The rest fell in behind as they hustled the captive down the hall and into the big sound-proofed dining room. They kept Lowiewski standing, well away from any movable object in the room; Alex Unpronounceable took his left arm as MacLeod released it and went to the communicator and punched the all-outlets button.
“Dr. Maillard; Dr. Sir Neville Lawton; Dr. ben-Hillel; Dr. von Heldenfeld; Mlle. Khouroglu,” he called. “Dr. MacLeod speaking. Come at once, repeat at once, to the round table—Dr. Maillard; Dr. Sir Neville Lawton—”
* * * *
Karen said something to the Japanese and went outside. For a while, nobody spoke. Kato came over and lit a cigarette in the bowl of MacLeod’s pipe. Then the other Team members entered in a body. Evidently Karen had intercepted them in the hallway and warned them that they would find some unusual situation inside; even so, there was a burst of surprised exclamations when they found Adam Lowiewski under detention.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” MacLeod said, “I regret to tell you that I have placed our colleague, Dr. Lowiewski, under arrest. He is suspected of betraying confidential data to agents of the Fourth Komintern. Yesterday, I learned that data on all our work here, including Team-secret data on the Sugihara Effect, had got into the hands of the Komintern and was being used in research at the Smolensk laboratories. I also learned that General Nayland blames this Team as a whole with double-dealing and selling this data to the Komintern. I don’t need to go into any lengthy exposition of General Nayland’s attitude toward this Team, or toward Free Scientists as a class, or toward the research-contract system. Nor do I need to point out that if he pressed these charges against us, some of us could easily suffer death or imprisonment.”
The H. Beam Piper Megapack Page 11
