“Unnoticed by any tracking station? Out of over six thousand separate monitoring devices in orbit in the Sol system none detected the time capsule when it arrived?”
Frowning, Freya said, “What do you mean to imply, Rachmael?”
“The time capsule,” Rachmael said, “from Whale’s Mouth, the launching of which we watched years ago on TV—it wasn’t detected by our tracking stations because it never arrived. And it never arrived, Miss Holm, because despite those crowd scenes it was never sent.”
“You mean what we saw on TV—”
“The vid signal, via Telpor,” Rachmael said, “which showed the happy masses at Whale’s Mouth cheering at the vast public launching ceremony of the time capsule—were fakes. I’ve run and rerun recordings of them; the crowd noise is spurious.” Reaching into his cloak he brought out a seven-inch reel of iron oxide Ampex and tape; he tossed it onto her desk. “Play it back. Carefully. There were no people cheering. And for a good reason. Because no time capsule, containing quaint artifacts from the Fomalhaut ancient civilizations, was launched from Whale’s Mouth.”
“But—” She stared at him in disbelief, then picked up the aud tape, held the reel uncertainly. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Rachmael said. “But when the Omphalos reaches the Fomalhaut system and Whale’s Mouth and I see Newcolonizedland, I’ll know.” And, he thought, I don’t think I’ll find ten or sixty malcontents out of forty million . . . by that time, of course, it’ll be something like a billion colonists. I’ll find—
He ended the thought abruptly. He did not know.
But eventually he would know. In the little matter of eighteen years.
2
In the sybaritic living room of his villa, on his satellite as it orbited Terra, the owner of Lies Incorporated, Matson Glazer-Holliday, sat in his human-made dressing gown smoking a prize, rare Antonio y Cleopatra cigar and listening to the aud tape of the crowd noises.
And, directly before him he watched the oscilloscope as it transformed the audio signal into a visual one.
To Freya Holm he said, “Yes, there is a cycle. You can see it, even though you can’t hear it. This aud track is continuous, running over and over again. Hence the man’s right; it’s a fake.”
“Could Rachmael ben Applebaum have—”
“No,” Matson said. “I’ve sequestered an aud copy from the UN info archives; it agrees. Rachmael didn’t tamper with the tape; it’s exactly what he claims it to be.” He sat back, pondering.
Strange, he thought, that von Einem’s Telpor gadget works only one way, radiating matter out . . . with no return of that matter, at least by teleportation, possible. So, rather conveniently for Trails of Hoffman, all we get via Telpor as a feedback from Whale’s Mouth is an electronic signal, energy alone . . . and this one now exposed as a fake; as a research agency I should have discovered this long ago—Rachmael, with all his creditors hounding him jet-balloonwise, keeping him awake night and day, hammering at him with countless technological assists, impeding him in the normal course of conducting routine business, has detected this spuriousness, and I—damn it. Matson thought, I missed, here. He felt gloomy.
“Cutty Sark Scotch and water?” Freya asked.
He nodded absently as Freya, who was his mistress, disappeared into the liquor antechamber of the villa to see if the 1985 bottle—worth a fortune—were empty yet.
But, on the credit side, he had been suspicious.
From the start he had doubted the so-called “Theorem One” of Dr. von Einem; it sounded too much like a cover, this one-way transmission by the technicians of THL’s multitude of retail outlets. Write home from Whale’s Mouth, son, when you get there, he thought acidly; tell your old mom how it is on the colony world with its fresh air, sunshine, all those cute little animals, those wondrous buildings THL robots are constructing . . . and the report-back, the letter, as electronic signal, had duly arrived. But the beloved son; he could not personally, directly report. Could not return to tell his story, and, as in the ancient story of the lion’s den, all the footprints of guileless creatures led in to the den, yet none led out. It was the fable all over again—with something even more sinister added. That of what appeared more and more to be a thoroughly phony trail of outgoing tracks: the electronic message-units. By someone who is versed in sophisticated hardware, Matson thought; someone is tinkering around, and is there any reason to look beyond the figure of Dr. Sepp von Einem himself, the inventor of the Telpor, plus Neues Einige Deutschland’s very efficient technicians who ran Ferry’s retail machinery?
There was something he did not like about those German technicians who manned the Telpors. So businesslike. As their ancestors must have been, Matson mused. Back in the twentieth century when those ancestors, with the same affectless calm, fed bodies into ovens or living humans into ersatz shower baths which turned out to be Zyklon B hydrogen cyanide gas chambers. And financed by reputable big Third Reich business, by Herr Krupp u. Sohnen. Just as von Einem is financed by Trails of Hoffman, with its vast central offices in Grosser Berlinstadt—the new capital of New Whole Germany, the city in fact from which our distinguished UN Secretary General emanates.
“Get me,” Matson said to Freya, “instead of Scotch and water, the file on Horst Bertold.”
In the other room Freya rang up the autonomic research equipment wired into the walls of the villa . . . electronic hardware, minned—miniaturized—for the most part, of a data-sorting and receiving nature, plus the file-banks, and—
Certain useful artifacts which did not involve data but which involved high-velocity A-warhead darts that, were the satellite to be attacked by any of the UN’s repertory of offensive weapons, would take up the fight and abolish the missiles before they reached their target.
At his villa on his Brocard ellipse satellite Matson was safe. And, as a precaution, he conducted as much business as possible from this spot; below, in New York City, at Lies Incorporated’s offices, he always felt naked. Felt, in fact, the nearby presence of the UN and Horst Bertold’s legions of “Peace Workers,” those armed, gray-faced men and women who, in the name of Pax Terrae, roamed the world, even into the pathetic moonies, the sad, failure-but-still-extant early “colony” satellites which had come before von Einem’s breakthrough and the discovery by George Hoffman of Fomalhaut IX, now called Whale’s Mouth and now the colony.
Too bad, Matson thought archly, that George Hoffman didn’t discover more planets in more star systems habitable by us, the frail needs of living, sentient, mentating biochemical upright bipeds which we humans are.
Hundreds and hundreds of planets, but—
Instead, temperature which melted thermo-fuses. No air. No soil. No water.
One could hardly say of such worlds—Venus had proved a typical example—that the “living was easy.” The living, in fact, on such worlds was confined to homeostatic domes with their own at, wa, and self-regu temp.
Housing, per dome, perhaps three hundred somatic souls. Rather a small number, considering that as of this year Terra’s population stood at seven billion.
“Here,” Freya said, sliding down to seat herself, legs tucked under her, on the deep-pile wool carpet near Matson. “The file on H.B.” She opened it at random; Lies Incorporated field reps had done a thorough job: many data existed here that, via the UN’s carefully watchdogged info media, never had reached the public, even the so-called “critical” analysts and columnists. They could, by law, criticize to their hearts’ content, the character, habits, abilities and shaving customs of Herr Bertold . . . except, however, the basic facts were denied them.
Not so, however, to Lies Incorporated—an ironic sobriquet, in view of the absolutely verified nature of the data now before its owner.
It was harsh reading. Even for him.
The year of Horst Bertold’s birth: 1964. Slightly before the Space Age had begun; like Matson Glazer-Holliday, Horst was a remnant of the old world when all that had been glimpsed in the sky were “flying saucers,” a misnomer for a U.S. Air Force antimissile weapon which had, in the brief confrontation of 1992, proved ineffectual. Horst had been born to middle-class Berlin—West Berlin, it had then been called, because, and this was difficult to remember, Germany had in those days been divided—parents: his father had owned a meat market . . . rather fitting, Matson reflected, in that Horst’s father had been an S.S. officer and former member of an Einsatzgruppe which had murdered thousands of innocent persons of Slavic and Jewish ancestry . . . although this had not interfered with Johann Bertold’s meat market business in the 1960s and ’70s. And then, in 1982, at the age of eighteen, young Horst himself had entered the spotlight (needless to say, the statute of limitations had run out on his father, who had never been prosecuted by the West German legal apparatus for his crimes of the ’40s, and had, in addition, evaded the commando squads from Israel who, by 1980, had closed up shop, given up the task of tracking down the former mass murderers). Horst, in 1982, had been a leader in the Reinholt Jugend.