After we decided that Mike should talk voice-to-voice to any comrade under some circumstances, it was necessary to give him more voices and dress him up, make him three dimensions, create “Adam Selene, Chairman of the Provisional Committee of Free Luna.”
Mike’s need for more voices lay in fact that he had just one voder-vocoder, whereas his brain could handle a dozen conversations, or a hundred (don’t know how many)–like a chess master playing fifty opponents, only more so.
This would cause a bottleneck as organization grew and Adam Selene was phoned oftener, and could be crucial if we lasted long enough to go into action.
Besides giving him more voices I wanted to silence one he had. One of those so-called computermen might walk into machines room while we were phoning Mike; bound to cause even his dim wit to wonder if he found master machine apparently talking to itself.
Voder-vocoder is very old device. Human voice is buzzes and hisses mixed various ways; true even of a coloratura soprano. A vocoder analyzes buzzes and hisses into patterns, one a computer (or trained eye) can read. A voder is a little box which can buzz and hiss and has controls to vary these elements to match those patterns. A human can “play” a voder, producing artificial speech; a properly programmed computer can do it as fast, as easily, as clearly as you can speak.
But voices on a phone wire are not sound waves but electrical signals; Mike did not need audio part of voder-vocoder to talk by phone. Sound waves were needed only by human at other end; no need for speech sounds inside Mike’s room at Authority Complex. so I planned to remove them, and thereby any danger that somebody might notice.
First I worked at home, using number-three arm most of time. Result was very small box which sandwiched twenty voder-vocoder circuits minus audio side. Then I called Mike and told him to “get ill” in way that would annoy Warden. Then I waited.
We had done this “get ill” trick before. I went back to work once we learned that I was clear, which was Thursday that same week when Alvarez read into Zebra file an account of shambles at Stilyagi Hall. His version listed about one hundred people (out of perhaps three hundred); list included Shorty Mkrum, Wyoh, Prof, and Finn Nielsen but not me–apparently I was missed by his finks. It told how nine police officers, each deputized by Warden to preserve peace, had been shot down in cold blood. Also named three of our dead.
An add-on a week later stated that “the notorious agente provocateuse Wyoming Knott of Hong Kong in Luna, whose incendiary speech on Monday 13 May had incited the riot that cost the lives of nine brave officers, had not been apprehended in Luna City and had not returned to her usual haunts in Hong Kong in Luna, and was now believed to have died in the massacre she herself set off.” This add-on admitted what earlier report failed to mention, i.e., bodies were missing and exact number of dead was not known.
This P.S. settled two things: Wyoh could not go home nor back to being a blonde.
Since I had not been spotted I resumed my public ways, took care of customers that week, bookkeeping machines and retrieval files at Carnegie Library, and spent time having Mike read out Zebra file and other special files, doing so in Room L of Raffles as I did not yet have my own phone. During that week Mike niggled at me like an impatient child (which he was), wanting to know when I was coming over to pick up more jokes. Failing that, he wanted to tell them by phone.
I got annoyed and had to remind myself that from Mike’s viewpoint analyzing jokes was just as important as freeing Luna–and you don’t break promises to a child.
Besides that. I got itchy wondering whether I could go inside Complex without being nabbed. We knew Prof was not clear, was sleeping in Raffles on that account. Yet they knew he had been at meeting and knew where he was, daily–but no attempt was made to pick him up. When we learned that attempt had been made to pick up Wyoh, I grew itchier. Was I clear? Or were they waiting to nab me quietly? Had to know.