Taking the risk that a UN monitor might pick up his signal, Al Dosker sent out an 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, “out[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: 11101001100111010110000010011010100111 0000100111110100000111. 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 Incorporated 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?”
“No,” Dosker said, and sat staring straight ahead, blindly.
The UN officer said, “We tracked the Omphalos by her carrier-wave transmission, also. As we did your ship.”
“Good bit,” Dosker said sardonically.
“However, due to the distance involved, it will take several days to reach her.”
Dosker said, “But you will, though.”
“That is a certainty,” the UN officer said, with his heavy Swedish accent, nodding. He had no doubts. Nor did Dosker.
The only issue was the time-factor. As the officer said, some few days; no more.
He stared ahead, sat, waited, as the high-velocity UN pursuit ship hurried toward Terra, New New York and Horst Bertold.
At the UN Headquarters in New New York he was given a thorough physical examination; the doctors and nurses attached one testing apparatus after another, checked their readings, located no grafted-in subdermal devices.
“You survived your ordeal amazingly well,” the doctor in charge informed him, at last, as he was given his clothing and allowed once more to dress.
“And now what?” Dosker asked.
“The Secretary General is ready to see you,” the doctor said briefly, marking his chart; he nodded his head to ward a door.
Having dressed, Dosker walked step by step to the door, opened it.
“Please hurry it up,” Horst Bertold said.
Shutting the door after him Dosker said, “Why?”
Seated at his large antique oak desk, the UN Secretary General glanced up; he was a heavy man, red-haired, with a pinched, elongated nose and almost colorless small lips. His features were small but his shoulders, his arms and his ribcage, bulged, as if from countless steam baths and from handball; his legs, his feet, showed the tonus of great childhood walking trips and miles of bike riding: this was an outdoor man, confined by his job to a desk, but longing for open spaces which did not now exist. A thoroughly healthy man, physically-speaking, Dosker thought. Strange, he thought, and, in spite of himself, received a good impression.
“We picked up your radio communication with the Omphalos,” Bertold said, his English perfect—in fact overly perfect; it had a tape-like quality, and probably it had been so learned. The impression here was not so good. “Thereby as you know we located both ships. We also understand that you are now the ranking executive of Lies Incorporated, Miss Holm and Mr. Glazer-Holliday having crossed via Telpor—under cover names, of course—to Whale’s Mouth.”
Dosker shrugged, said nothing, imparted no free information; waited.
“However—” Horst Bertold tapped his pen against the top document on his desk, frowned. “This is a transcript, verbatim, of the interchange between you and the fanatic, Rachmael ben Applebaum. You initiated the radio exchange; you raised the Omphalos.” Bertold glanced up and his blue, light eyes were sharp. “We have put our cryptographers on the sequence in code which you transmitted . . . the same which you previously received from the Vidphone Corp. Intrinsically it means nothing. But in the wreckage of your ship we located your decoding computer, the intact box with its fifty tapes. We therefore matched the transmission and recorded binary sequence to the proper tape. And it was as you informed ben Applebaum.”