Heinlein, Robert A – Friday

“What sort of a code?”

“The simplest sort and thereby impossible to break. The first ad told the person or persons concerned to carry out number seven or expect number seven or it said something about something designated as seven. This one says the same with respect to code item number ten. But the meaning of the numbers cannot be deduced through statistical analysis because the code can be changed long before a useful statistical universe can be reached. It’s an idiot code, Friday, and an idiot code can never be broken if the user has the good sense not to go too often to the well.”

“Georges, you sound as if you had done military code and/or cipher work.”

“I have but that’s not where I learned it. The most difficult code analysis ever attempted-one that still goes on today and will never be complete-is the interpretation of living genes. An idiot code all of it. . . but repeated so many millions of times that we can eventually assign meaning to nonsense syllables. Forgive me for talking shop at meals.”

“Piffle, I started it. No way to guess what A.C.B. means?”

“None.”

That night the assassins struck the second time, right on schedule. I don’t say that the two were related.

They struck ten days, almost to the hour, after their first attack. The timing did not tell us anything about which group was responsible~ as it matched the predictions of both the so-called Council for Survival and their rivals the Stimulators, whereas the Angels of the Lord had offered no prediction about a second strike.

There were differences between the first wave of terror and the second, differences that seemed to tell me something-or us something, as Georges and I discussed it as the reports came in:

a) No news at all from the Chicago Imperium. No change here, as no news had come out of the Imperium since the initial reports of the slaughter of Democrats . . . then nary a peep for over a week, which made me increasingly anxious.

b) No news from the California Confederacy concerning a second strike-routine news only. NB.: a few hours after the initial news reports of a second wave of assassinations elsewhere a “routine” news item came out of the California Confederacy. Chief “Warwhoop” Tumbril, on the advice of his physicians, had named a three-person executive regency with plenipotentiary powers to govern the nation while he underwent long-postponed medical treatment. He had gone to his retreat, the Eagle’s Nest, near Tahoe, for this purpose. Bulletins would be issued horn San Jose, not from Tahoe.

c) Georges and I agreed on the most probable-almost certain- meaning of this. The medical treatment that pitiful poseur now needed was embalming and his “regency” would now give news handouts while they settled their power struggle.

d) This second time there were no reports from off-Earth.

e) Canton and Manchuria did not report attacks. Correction: No such reports reached Vicksburg, Texas.

f) So fan as I could tell in ticking them off against a list, the terrorists did strike at all other nations. But my tally had holes in it. Of the four hundred-odd “nations” in the U.N. some produce news only during total solar eclipses. I don’t know what happened in Wales or the Channel Isles or Swaziland or Nepal or Prince Edward Island and I can’t see why anyone (who does not live in one of those nowhere places) should care. At least three hundred of those so-called sovereign nations that vote in the U.N. are ciphers, aboard only for quarters and rations-important to themselves, no doubt, but totally meaningless in Geopolitick. But in all major countries, except as noted above, the terrorists did strike and those strikes were reported except where baldly censored.

g) Most strikes failed. This was the glaring difference between the first wave and the second. Ten days earlier most assassins had killed their targets and most assassins had escaped. Now this was reversed:

Most targets survived, most assassins died. A few had been captured, a very few had escaped.

This last aspect of the second-wave assassinations put to rest a nagging fret in my mind, i.e., Boss was not the mover behind these assassinations.