“Right.” He switched off.
He left the booth light-heartedly, with the feeling of satisfaction that comes from a hard job successfully finished. He rather hoped that some of his “friends’ would show up; he felt like kicking somebody who needed kicking. But they disappointed him. He boarded the transcontinental rocket without alarms and slept all the way to New Washington.
He reached the Federal Bureau of Security by one of many concealed routes and went to his boss’s office. After scan and voice check he was let in. Bonn looked up and scowled.
Gilead ignored the expression; Bonn usually scowled.
“Agent Joseph Briggs, three-four-oh-nine-seven-two, reporting back from assignment, sir,” he said evenly.
Bonn switched a desk control to “recording” and another to “covert,” “You are, eh? Why, thumb — fingered idiot! How do you dare to show your face around here?”
“Easy now, boss — what’s the trouble?”
Bonn famed incoherently for a time, then said, “Briggs, twelve star men covered that pickup — and the box was empty. Post office box ten-sixty, Chicago, indeed! Where are those films? Was it a coverup? Have you got them with you?”
Gilead-Briggs restrained his surprise. “No. I mailed them at the Grand Concourse post office to the address you just named.” He added, “The machine may have kicked them out; I was forced to letter by hand the machine symbols.”
Bonn looked suddenly hopeful. He touched another control and said, “Carruthersi On that Briggs matter: Check the rejection stations for that routing.” He thought and then added, “Then try a rejection sequence on the assumption that the first symbol was acceptable to the machine but mistaken. Also for each of the other symbols; run diem simultaneously — crash priority for all agents and staff. After that try combinations of symbols taken two at a time, then three at a time, and so on.” He switched off.
‘The total of that series you just set up is every postal address in the continent,” Briggs suggested mildly. “It can’t be done.”
“It’s got to be done! Man, have you any idea of the importance of those films you were guarding?”
“Yes. The director at Moon Base told me what I was carrying.”
“You don t act as if you did. You’ve lost the most valuable thing this or any other government can possess — the absolute weapon. Yet you stand there blinking at me as if you had mislaid a pack of cigarettes.”
“Weapon?” objected Briggs. “I wouldn’t call the nova effect that, unless you class suicide as a weapon. And I don’t concede that I’ve lost it. As an agent acting alone and charged primarily with keeping it out of die hands of others, I used the best means available in an emergency to protect it. That is well within the limits of my authority. I was spotted, by some means — ”
“You shouldn’t have been spotted!”
“Granted. But I was. I was unsupported and my estimate of the situation did not include a probability of staying alive. Therefore I had to protect my charge by some means which did not depend on my staying alive.”
“But you did stay alive — you’re here.”
“Not my doing nor yours, I assure you. I should have been covered. It was your order, you will remember, that I act alone.”
Bonn looked sullen. “That was necessary.”
“So? In any case, I don’t see what all the shooting is about. Either the films show up, or they are lost and will be destroyed as unclaimed mail. So I go back to the Moon and get another set of prints.”
Bonn chewed his lip. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
Bonn hesitated a long time. “There were just two sets. You had the originals, which were to be placed in a vault in the Archives — and the others were to be destroyed at once when the originals were known to be secure.”
“Yes? What’s the hitch?”
“You don’t see the importance of the procedure. Every working paper, every file, every record was destroyed when these films were made. Every technician, every assistant, received hypno. The intention was not only to protect the results of the research but to wipe out the very fact that the research had taken place. There aren’t a dozen people in the system who even know of the existence of the nova effect.”