“I have one skill.” In the suitcase resting on the pavement beside him he had a transmitter which, small as it was, would send out a signal which, in six months, would reach Terra.
Bending, he brought out the key, turned the lock of the suitcase. All he had to do was open the suitcase, feed an inch of punched data-tape into the orifice of the transmitter’s encoder; the rest was automatic. He switched the power on; every electronic item mimicked clothing, especially shoes; it appeared as if he had come to Whale’s Mouth to walk his life away, and elegantly at that.
“Why?” he asked Freya as he programmed, with a tiny scholarly construct, the inch of tape. “An army for what?”
“I don’t know, Mat. It’s all Theodoric Ferry. I think Ferry is going to try to outspit the army on Terra that Horst Bertold commands. In the short time I’ve been here I’ve talked to a few people, but—they’re so afraid. One man thought there’d been a nonhumanoid sentient race found, and we’re preparing to strike for its colony-planets; maybe after a while and we’ve been here—”
Matson peered up and said, “I’ve encoded the tape to read, Garrison state. Sound out Bertold. It’ll go to our top pilot, Al Dosker, repeated over and over again, because at this distance the noise-factor—”
A laser beam removed the back of his head.
Freya shut her eyes.
A second beam from the laser rifle with the telescopic sight destroyed first one suitcase and then its companion. And then a shiny, spic-and-span young soldier walked up, leisurely, the rifle held loosely; he glanced at her, up and down, carnally but with no particular passion, then looked down at the dead man, at Matson. “We caught your conversation on an aud rec.” He pointed, and Freya saw, then, on the overhang of the roof of the Telpor terminal building, a netlike interwoven mesh. “That man”—the soldier kicked—actually physically kicked with his toe—the corpse of Matson Glazer-Holliday—“said something about ‘our top pilot.’ You’re an organization, then. Friends of a United People? That it?”
She said nothing; she was unable to.
“Come along, honey,” the soldier said to her. “For your psych-interrogation. We held it off because you were kind enough—dumb enough—to inform us that your husband was following you. But we never—”
He died, because, by means of her “watch” she had released the low-velocity cephalotropic cyanide dart; it moved slowly, but still he had not been able to evade it; he batted at it, childishly, with his hand, not quite alarmed, not quite wise and frightened enough, and its tip penetrated a vein near his wrist. And death came as swiftly and soundlessly as it had for Matson. The soldier swiveled and unwound and unwound in his descent to the pavement, and Freya, then, turned and ran—
At a corner she went to the right, and, as she ran down a narrow, rubbish-heaped alley, reached into her cloak, touched the aud transmitter which sent out an all-points, planet-wide alarm signal-alert; every Lies, Incorporated employee here at Whale’s Mouth would be picking it up, if this was not already apparent to him: if the alarm signal added anything to his knowledge, that which had probably come, crushingly, within the first five minutes here on this side—this one-way side—of the Telpor apparatuses. Well, anyhow she had done that; she had officially, through technical channels, alerted them, and that was all—all she could do.
She had no long-range inter-system transmitter as Matson had had; she could not send out a macrowave signal which would be picked up by Al Dosker at the Sol system six months hence. In fact none of the two thousand police agents of Lies, Incorporated did. But they had weapons. She was, she realized with dread and disbelief, automatically now in charge of those of the organization who survived; months ago Matson had set her up legally so that on his death she assumed his chair, and this was not private: this had been circulated, memo-wise, throughout the organization.
What could she tell the police agents who had gotten through— tell them, of course, that Matson was dead, but what would be of use to them? What, she asked herself, can we do?
Eighteen years, she thought; do we have to wait for the Omphalos, for Rachmael ben Applebaum to arrive and see? Because by then it won’t matter. For us, anyhow; nor for this generation.
Two men ran toward her and one bleated, “Moon and cow,” shrilly, his face contorted with fear.
“Jack Horner,” she said numbly. “I don’t know what to do,” she said to them. “Matson is dead and his big transmitter is destroyed. They were waiting for him; I led them right to him. I’m sorry.” She could not face the two field reps of the organization; she stared rigidly past them. “Even if we put our weapons into use,” she said, “they can take all of us out.”
“But we can do some damage,” one of the two police, middle-aged, with that fat spare tire at his middle, a tough old vet of the ’92 war, said.
His companion, clasping a valise, said, “Yes, we can try, Miss Holm. Send out that signal; you have it?”
“No,” she said, but she was lying and they knew it. “It’s hopeless,” she said. “Let’s try to pass as authentic emigrants. Let them draft us, put us into the barracks.”
The seasoned, hard-eyed paunchy one said, “Miss Holm, when they get into the luggage, they’ll know.” To his companion he said, “Bring it out.”
Together, as she watched, the two experienced field reps of Lies, Incorporated assembled a small intricate weapon of a type she had never seen before; evidently it was from their advanced weapons archives.
To her the younger man said quietly, “Send the signal. For a fight. As soon as our people come through; keep the signal going so they’ll pick it up as they emerge. We’ll fight at this spot, not later, not when they have us cut down into individuals, one here, one there.”
She. Touched. The. Signal-tab.
And then she said, quietly, “I’ll try to get a message-unit back to Terra via Telpor. Maybe in the confusion—” Because there was going to be a lot of confusion as the Lies, Incorporated men emerged and immediately picked up the fracas-in-progress signal “—maybe it’ll slip by.”
“It won’t,” the hard-eyed old tomcat of a fighter said to her. He glanced at his companion. “But if we focus on a transmission station maybe we can take and keep control long enough to run a vid track through. Pass it back through the Telpor gate. Even if all two thous of us were to—” He turned to Freya. “Can you direct the reps to make it to this point?”
“I have no more microwave patterns,” she said, this time truthfully. “Just those two.”
“Okay, Miss Holm.” The vet considered. “Vid transmissions through Telpor are accomplished over there.” He pointed and she saw an isolated multi-story structure, windowless, with a guarded entrance; in the gray sun of midday she caught a glint of metal, or armed sentries. “You have the code for back home you can transmit?”
“Yes,” she said. “One of fifty. Mat and I both had them; committed to memory. I could transmit it by aud in ten seconds.”
“I want,” the wary, half-crouching veteran policeman said, “a vid track of this.” He swung his hand at the landscape. “Something that can be spliced into the central coaxial cable and run on TV. Not just that we know but that they know.” They. The people back home—the innocents who lay beyond the one-way gate; forever, she thought, because eighteen years is, really, forever.
“What’s the code?” the younger field rep asked her.
Freya said. “ ‘Forgot to pack my Irish linen handkerchiefs. Please transmit via Telpor.’ ” She explained, “We, Mat and I, worked out all logical possibilities. This comes the closest. Sparta.”
“Yep,” the older vet said. “The warrior state. The trouble-maker. Well, it is close geographically to Athens, although not quite close enough.” To his companion he said, “Can we get in there and transmit the aud signal?” He picked up the weapon which they had assembled.
“Sure,” his younger companion said, nodding.
The older man clicked the weapon on.
Freya saw, then, into th
e grave and screamed; she ran and as she ran, struggled to get away, she knew it for what it was: a refined form of nerve gas that—and then her coherent thoughts ceased and she simply ran.
The armed sentry-soldiers guarding the windowless building ran, too.
And, unaffected, their metabolisms insulated by preinjective antidotal hormones, the two field reps of Lies, Incorporated dogtrotted toward the windowless structure, and, as they trotted, brought out small, long-range laser pistols with telescopic sights.
That was her final view of them; at that point panic and flight swallowed her and it was only darkness. And a darkness into which people of all sorts—she glimpsed, felt, them dimly—ran alongside in company with her; she was not alone: the future radiated.
Mat, she thought. You will not have your police state here at Whale’s Mouth, and I warned you; I told you. But, she thought, maybe now they won’t either. If that encoded message can be put through. If.
And if, on the Terran side, there is someone smart enough to know what to do with it.
SIXTEEN
In his ship near the orbit of Pluto, Al Dosker received, routinely, the message transmitted from Freya Holm at Whale’s Mouth to the New New York office of Lies, Incorporated.
FORGOT TO PACK MY IRISH LINEN HANDKERCHIEFS. PLEASE TRANSMIT VIA TELPOR. FREYA.
He walked to the rear of the ship, leisurely, because at this distance from the sun everything seemed entropic, slowed down; it was as if, out here, there was a slower beat of the sidereal clock.
Opening the code box he ran his finger down the Fs. Then found the key. He then took the message and fed it directly into the computer which held the spools that comprised the contents of the box.
Out came a paper ribbon with typed words. He read them.
MILITARY DICTATORSHIP. BARRACKS LIFE ON SPARTAN BASIS. PREPARATION FOR WAR AGAINST UNKNOWN FOE.
Dosker stood for a moment, then, taking the original encoded message, as handled by Vidphone Corporation, ran it through the computer once again. And, once again, he read the message in clear and once again it said what it had to say—could not be denied from saying. And there was no doubt, because Matson Glazer-Holliday himself had programmed the computer-box.
This, Dosker thought. Out of fifty possibilities ranging from the Elysium field to—hell.
Roughly, this lay halfway on the hell side. By a gross count of ten. It ranked about as bad as he had expected.
So, he thought, now we know.
We know . . . and we can’t validate it.
The scrap of ribbon, the encoded message, was, incredible as it seemed, completely, utterly worthless.
Because, he asked himself, whom do we take it to?
Their own organization, Lies, Incorporated, had been truncated by Mat’s action, by the sending of their best men to Whale’s Mouth; all which remained was the staff of bureaucrats in New New York—and himself.
And, of course, Rachmael ben Applebaum out in ’tween space in the Omphalos. Busily learning Attic Greek.
Now, from the New New York office, a second message, encoded, arrived; this, too, he fed to the computer, more quickly, this time. It came out drearily and he read it with futile shame— shame because he had tried and failed to stop what Matson planned; he felt the moral weight on himself.
WE CANNOT HOLD OUT. VIVISECTION IN PROGRESS.
Can I help you? he wondered, suffering in his impotent rage. Goddamn you, Matson, he thought, you had to do it; you were greedy. And you took two thousand men and Freya Holm with you, to be slaughtered over there where we can’t do anything because “we” consist of nothing.
However, he could perform one final act—his effort, not connected with the effort to save the multitude of Terran citizens who, within the following days, weeks, would be filing through Telpor gates to Whale’s Mouth, but to save someone who deserved a reprieve from a self-imposed burden; a burden which these two encoded messages via Telpor and the Vidphone Corp had rendered obsolete.
Taking the risk that a UN monitor might pick up his signal, Al Dosker sent out a u.h.f. beamed radio signal to the Omphalos and Rachmael ben Applebaum.
When he raised the Omphalos, now at hyper-see velocity and beyond the Sol system, Dosker asked brutally, “How’s the odes of Pindar coming?”
“Just simple fables so far,” Rachmael’s voice came, distantly, mixed with the background of static, of inter-system interference as the signal-gathering cone aboard Dosker’s ship rotated, tried to gather the weak, far-distant impulse. “But you weren’t supposed to contact me,” Rachmael said, “unless—”
“Unless,” Dosker said, “this happened. We have, at Lies, Incorporated, an encoding method that can’t be broken. Because the data are not in what’s transmitted. Listen carefully, Rachmael.” And, amplified by his ship’s transmitter, his words—he hoped— were reaching the Omphalos; a segment of his equipment recorded his words and broadcast them several times: a multiplication of the signal to counter, on a statistical basis, the high background; by utilizing the principle of repetition he expected to get his message through to Rachmael. “You know the joke about the prison inmate,” Dosker said, “who stands up and yells, ‘Three.’ And everyone laughs.”
“Yes,” Rachmael said alertly. “Because ‘three’ refers to an entire multi-part joke. Which all the inmates know; they’ve been confined together so long.”
“By that method,” Dosker said, “our transmission from Whale’s Mouth operated today. We have a binary computer as the decoder. Originally, we started out by flipping a coin for each letter of the alphabet. Tails made it zero or gate-shut; heads means one or gate-open. It’s either zero or one; that’s the binary computer’s modus operandi. Then we invented fifty message-units which describe possible conditions on the other side; the messages were constructed in such a way that each consisted of a unique sequence of ones and zeros. I—” His voice came out ragged, hoarse. “I have just now received a message, which when reduced to the elements of the binary system consists of a sequence reading: 11101001100111 0101100000100110101001110000100111110100000111. There is nothing intrinsic in this binary sequence that can be decoded, because it simply acts as one of the fifty unique signals known to our box—here on my ship—and it trips one particular tape. But its length—it gives a spurious impression to cryptographers of an intrinsic message.”
“And your tape—” Rachmael said, “that was tripped—”
“I’ll paraphrase,” Dosker said. “The operational word is— Sparta.” He was silent then.
“A garrison state?” Rachmael’s voice came.
“Yes.”
“Against whom?”
“They didn’t say. A second message came, but it added relatively little. Except that it came through in clear and it told us that they can’t hold out. They’re being decimated by the military, over there.”
“And you’re sure this is authentic data?” Rachmael asked.
“Only Freya Holm, Matson and I,” Dosker said, “have the decode boxes into which the messages can be fed as a binary tripping-sequence. It came from Freya, evidently; anyhow she signed the first.” He added, “They didn’t even try to sign the second one.”
“Well,” Rachmael said, “then I will turn back. There’s no point to my trip, now.”
“That’s up to you to decide.” He waited, wondering what Rachmael ben Applebaum’s decision would be; but, he thought, as you say, it really doesn’t matter, because the real tragedy is twenty-four light-years away, and not the destruct, the taking-out, of Lies, Incorporated’s two thousand best people, but—the forty million who’ve gone before. And the eighty million or more who will follow, since, though we have this knowledge on this side of the teleport gates, there’s no means by which we can communicate it over the mass info media to the population—
He was thinking that when the UN pursuit ships, three of them like black sliding fish, closed noiselessly in on him, reached a.-to-a. missile range; their missiles fired, and Dosker’s Lies, Incorpor
ated ship was cut into fragments.
Stunned, passive, he floated in his self-contained suit with its own air, heat, water, transmitter, waste-disposal deposit box, squeeze-tubes of food . . . he drifted on and on, seemingly for eternity, thinking about vague and even happy things, about a planet of green forests and of women and the tinkling noise of get-togethers, and yet knowing dully that he could live only a short time like this, and wondering, too, if the UN had gotten the Omphalos as they had gotten him; obviously their vigilant switchboard of monitors had picked up his radio carrier-wave, but whether they had picked up Rachmael’s too, which operated on another band . . . god, he thought, I hope not; I hope it’s just me.
He was still hoping when the UN pursuit ship moved up beside him, sent out a robot-like construct which fished at him until it had with great care grappled him without puncturing his suit. Amazed, he thought, Why don’t they just dig a little hole in the suit-fabric, let out the air and heat, let me float here and meanwhile die?
It bewildered him. And now a hatch of the UN pursuit ship was opening; he was reeled in, like an enmeshed quarry; the hatch slammed shut and he felt the artificial gravity which prevailed within the expensive, ultra-modern vessel; he lay prone and then, wearily, got to his feet, stood.
Facing him, a uniformed UN senior officer, armed, said, “Take off your suit. Your emergency suit. Understand?” He spoke with a heavy accent; Dosker saw, by his armband, that he was from the Nordic League.
Piece by piece, Dosker shed his emergency suit.
“You Goths,” Dosker said, “seem to be running things.” At the UN, anyhow. He wondered about Whale’s Mouth.
The UN officer, still pointing the laser pistol at him, said, “Sit down. We are returning to Terra. Nach Terra; versteh’n?” Behind him a second UN employee, not armed, sat at the control console; the ship was on a high-velocity course directed toward the third planet and Dosker guessed that only an hour’s travel lay ahead. “The Secretary General,” the UN officer said, “has asked to speak to you personally. Meanwhile, compose yourself and wait. Would you like a magazine to read? We have UN Back-peop Assist. Or an entertain-spool to watch?”
Lies, Inc. Page 19
