Beep
JOSEF PABER lowered his newspaper slightly. Finding the girl
on the park bench looking his way, he smiled the agonizingly
embarrassed smile of the thoroughly married nobody caught
bird-watching, and ducked back into the paper again.

He was reasonably certain that he looked the part of a
middle-aged, steadily employed, harmless citizen enjoying a
Sunday break in the bookkeeping and family routines. He
was also quite certain, despite his official instructions, that
it wouldn't make  the  slightest bit of difference  if he didn't.

These boy-meets-girl assignments always came off. Jo had
never tackled a single one that had required him.
As a matter of fact, the newspaper, which he was supposed
to be using only as a blind, interested him a good deal more
than his job did. He had only barely begun to suspect the
obvious ten years ago when the Service had snapped him
up; now, after a decade as an agent, he was still fascinated
to see how smoothly the really important situations came off.
The dangerous situations -- not boy-meets-girl.

This affair of the Black Horse Nebula, for instance. Some
days ago the papers and the commentators had begun to
mention reports of disturbances in that area, and Jo's
practiced eye had picked up the mention. Something big
was cooking.

Today it had boiled over -- the Black Horse Nebula had
suddenly spewed ships by the hundreds, a massed armada
that must have taken more than a century of effort on the
part of a whole star cluster, a production drive conducted
in the strictest and most fanatical kind of secrecy. . . .

And, of course, the Service had been on the spot in plenty
of time. With three times as many ships, disposed with
mathematical precision so as to enfilade the entire armada
the moment it broke from the nebula. The battle had been
a massacre, the attack smashed before the average citizen
could even begin to figure out what it had been aimed at
and good had triumphed over evil once more.

Of course.

Furtive scuffings on the gravel drew his attention briefly.
He looked at his watch, which said 14:58:03. That was the
time, according to his instructions, when boy had to meet
girl.

He had been given the strictest kind of orders to let nothing
interfere with this meetingthe orders always issued on boy-
meets-girl assignments. But, as usual, he had nothing to do
but observe. The meeting was coming off on the dot, without
any prodding from Jo. They always did.

Of course.

With a sigh, he folded his newspaper, smiling again at the
couple -- yes, it was the right man, too -- and moved away, as
if reluctantly. He wondered what would happen were he to
pull away the false mustache, pitch the newspaper on the
grass, and bound away with a joyous whoop. He suspected
that the course of history would not be deflected by even a
second of arc, but he was not minded to try the experiment.

The park was pleasant. The twin suns warmed the path
and the greenery without any of the blasting heat which they
would bring to bear later in the summer. Randolph was
altogether the most comfortable planet he had visited in
years. A little backward, perhaps, but restful, too.
It was also slightly over a hundred light-years away from
Earth. It would be interesting to know how Service head-
quarters on Earth could have known in advance that boy
would meet girl at a certain spot on Randolph, precisely
at 14:58:03.

Or how Service headquarters could have ambushed with
micrometric precision a major interstellar fleet, with no more
preparation than a few days' buildup in the newspapers and
video could evidence.

The press was free, on Randolph as everywhere. It reported
the news it got. Any emergency concentration of Service
ships in the Black Horse area, or anywhere else, would have
been noticed and reported on. The Service did not forbid
such reports for "security" reasons or for any other reasons.

Yet there had been nothing to report but that (a) an armada
of staggering size had erupted with no real warning from the
Black Horse Nebula, and that (b) the Service had been ready.
By now, it was a commonplace that the Service was always
ready. It had not had a defect or a failure in well over two
centuries. It had not even had a fiasco, the alarming-sounding
technical word by which it referred to the possibility that a
boy-meets-girl assignment might not come off.

Jo hailed a hopper. Once inside he stripped himself of the
mustache, the bald spot, the forehead creases -- all the make-
up which had given him his mask of friendly innocuousness.
The hoppy watched the whole process in the rear-view
mirror. Jo glanced up and met his eyes.

"Pardon me, mister, but I figured you didn't care if I saw
you. You must be a Service man."

"That's right. Take me to Service HQ, will you?"

"Sure enough." The hoppy gunned his machine. It rose
smoothly to the express level. "First time I ever got close to
a Service man. Didn't hardly believe it at first when I saw
you taking your face off. You sure looked different."

"Have to, sometimes," Jo said, preoccupied.

"I'll bet. No wonder you know all about everything before
it breaks. You must have  a thousand  faces  each, your own
mother wouldn't know you, eh? Don't you care if I know
about your snooping around in disguise?"

Jo grinned. The grin created a tiny pulling sensation across
one curve of his cheek, just next to his nose. He stripped
away the overlooked bit of tissue and examined it critically.
"Of course not. Disguise is an elementary part of Service
work. Anyone could guess that. We don't use it often, as a
matter of fact -- only on very simple assignments."

"Oh." The hoppy sounded slightly disappointed, as melo-
drama faded. He drove silently for about a minute. Then,
speculatively:  "Sometimes I think the Service must have
time-travel, the things they pull. . . . Well, here you are.
Good luck, mister."

"Thanks."

Jo  went  directly  to  Krasna's  office.  Krasna was  a
Randolpher. Earth-trained, and answerable to the Earth office,
but otherwise pretty much on his own. His heavy, muscular
face wore the same expression of serene confidence that was
characteristic  of  Service officials  everywhere -- even  some
that, technically speaking, had no faces to wear it.

"Boy meets girl," Jo said briefly. "On the nose and on
the spot."

"Good work, Jo. Cigarette?" Krasna pushed the box across
his desk.

"Nope, not now. Like to talk to you, if you've got time."

Krasna pushed a button, and a toadstool-like chair rose out
of the floor behind Jo. "What's on your mind?"

"Well," Jo said carefully. "I'm wondering why you patted
me on the back just now for not doing a job."

"You did a job."

"I did not," Jo said flatly. "Boy would have met girl,
whether I'd been here on Randolph or back on Earth, The
course of true love always runs smooth. It has in all my
boy-meets-girl cases, and it has in the boy-meets-girl cases
of every other agent with whom I've compared notes."

"Well, good," Krasna said, smiling. "That's the way we
like to have it run. And that's the way we expect it to run.
But, Jo, we like to have somebody on the spot, somebody
with a reputation for resourcefulness, just in case there's a
snag. There almost never is, as you've observed. But -- if
there were?"

Jo snorted. "If what you're trying to do is to establish
preconditions for the future, any interference by a Service
agent would throw the eventual result farther off the track.
I know that much about probability."

"And what makes you think that we're trying to set up
the future?"

"It's obvious even to the hoppies on your own planet; the
one that brought me here told me he thought the Service had
time-travel. It's especially obvious to all the individuals and
governments and entire populations that the Service has
bailed out of serious messes for centuries, with never a single
failure." Jo shrugged.  "A man  can be asked to safeguard
only a small number of boy-meets-girl cases before he realizes,
as an agent, that what the Service is safeguarding is the
future children of those meetings. Ergo -- the Service knows
what those children are to be like, and has reason to want
their future existence guaranteed. What other conclusion is
possible?"

Krasna took out a cigarette and lit it deliberately; it was
obvious that he was using the maneuver to cloak his response.
"None," he admitted at last. "We have some foreknowl-
edge, of course. We couldn't have made our reputation with
espionage alone. But we have obvious other advantages:
genetics, for instance, and operations research, the theory of
games, the Dirac transmitterit's quite an arsenal, and of
course there's a good deal of prediction involved in all those
things."

"I see that," Jo said. He shifted in his chair, formulating
all  he  wanted  to  say.  He  changed  his  mind  about  the
cigarette and helped himself to one. "But these things don't
add up to infallibility -- and that's a qualitative difference,
Kras. Take this affair of the Black Horse armada. The mo-
ment the armada appeared, we'll assume, Earth heard about
it by Dirac,  and  started  to  assemble  a  counter-armada.  But
it takes finite time to bring together a concentration of ships
and men, even if your message system is instantaneous.

"The Service's counter-armada was already on hand. It had
been building there for so long and with so little fuss that
nobody even noticed it concentrating until a day or so before
the battle. Then planets in the area began to sit up and
take notice, and be uneasy about what was going to break.
But not very uneasy; the Service always wins -- that's been
a statistical fact for centuries. Centuries, Kras. Good Lord,
it takes  almost  as long  as that,  in  straight preparation,  to
pull some of the tricks we've pulled! The Dirac gives us an
advantage of ten to twenty-five years in really extreme cases
out on the rim of the Galaxy, but no more than that."

He realized that he had been fuming away on the cigarette
until the roof of his mouth was scorched, and snubbed it out
angrily. "That's a very different thing," he said, "than knowing
in a general way how an enemy is likely to behave, or what
kind of children the Mendelian laws say a given couple
should have. It means that we've some way of reading the
future in minute detail. That's in flat contradiction to every-
thing I've been taught about probability, but I have to believe
what I see."

Krasna laughed. "That's a very able presentation," he said.
He seemed genuinely pleased. "I think you'll remember that
you were first impressed into the Service when you began
to wonder why the news was always good. Fewer and fewer
people wonder about that now-a-days; it's become a part of
their expected environment." He stood up and ran a hand
through his hair. "Now you've carried yourself through the
next stage. Congratulations, Jo. You've just been promoted!"

"I have?" Jo said incredulously. "I came in here with the
notion that I might get myself fired."

"No. Come around to this side of the desk, Jo, and I'll
play you a little history." Krasna unfolded the desktop to
expose a small visor screen. Obediently Jo rose and went
around the desk to where he could see the blank surface.

"I had a standard indoctrination tape sent up to me a week
ago, in the expectation that you'd be ready to see it. Watch."
Krasna touched the board. A small dot of light appeared
in the center of the screen and went out again. At the same
time, there was a small beep of sound. Then the tape began
to unroll and a picture clarified on the screen.

"As you suspected," Krasna said conversationally, "the
Service is infallible. How it got that way is a story that
started several centuries back.

---

Dana Ljeher father had been a Hollander, her mother
born in the Celebessat down in the chair which Captain
Robin Weinbaum had indicated, crossed her legs, and waited,
her blue-black hair shining under the lights.
Weinbaum eyed her quizzically. The conqueror Resident
who had given the girl her entirely European name had been
paid in kind, for his daughter's beauty had nothing fair and
Dutch about it. To the eye of the beholder, Dana Lje seemed
a particularly delicate virgin of Bali, despite her Western
name, clothing and assurance. The combination had already
proven piquant for the millions who watched her television
column, and Weinbaum found it no less charming at first
hand.

"As one of your most recent victims," he said, "I'm not
sure that I'm honored, Miss Lje. A few of my wounds are
still bleeding. But I am a good deal puzzled as to why you're
visiting me now. Aren't you afraid that I'll bite back?"

"I had no intention of attacking you personally, and I
don't think I did," the video columnist said seriously. "It
was just pretty plain that our intelligence had slipped badly
in the Erskine affair. It was my job to say so. Obviously
you were going to get hurt, since you're head of the bureau
but there was no malice in it."

"Cold comfort," Weinbaum said dryly. "But thank you,
nevertheless."

The Eurasian girl shrugged. "That isn't what I came here
about, anyway. Tell me, Captain Weinbaumhave you ever
heard of an outfit calling itself Interstellar Information?"
Weinbaum shook his head. "Sounds like a skip-tracing
firm. Not an easy business, these days."

"That's just what I thought when I first saw their letter-
head," Dana said. "But the letter under it wasn't one that
a private-eye outfit would write. Let me read part of it to
you."

Her slim fingers burrowed in her inside jacket pocket and
emerged again with a single sheet of paper. It was plain
typewriter bond, Weinbaum noted automatically:  she had
brought only a copy with her, and had left the original of
the letter at home. The copy, then, would be incomplete
probably seriously.

"It goes like this: 'Dear Miss Lje: As a syndicated video
commentator with a wide audience and heavy responsibilities,
you need the best sources of information available. We would
like you to test our service, free of charge, in the hope of
proving to you that it is superior to any other source of news
on Earth. Therefore, we offer below several predictions
concerning events to come in the Hercules and the so-called
"Three Ghosts" areas. If these predictions are fulfilled 100
per centno lesswe ask that you take us on as your cor-
respondents for those areas, at rates to be agreed upon later.
If the predictions are wrong in any respect, you need not
consider us further.' "

"H'm," Weinbaum said slowly. "They're confident cusses
and that's an odd juxtaposition. The Three Ghosts make
up only a little solar system, while the Hercules area could
include the entire star clusteror maybe even the whole
constellation, which is a hell of a lot of sky. This outfit
seems to be trying to tell you that it has thousands of field
correspondents of its own, maybe as many as the government
itself. If so, I'll guarantee that they're bragging."

"That may well be so. But before you make up your mind,
let me  read you  one  of  the  two predictions."  The  letter
rustled in Dana Lje's hand. '"At 03:16:10, on Year Day,
2090, the Hess-type interstellar liner Brindisi will be attacked
in  the  neighborhood  of  the  Three  Ghosts  system  by
four' "

Weinbaum sat bolt upright in his swivel chair. "Let me
see that letter!" he said, his voice harsh with repressed alarm.

"In a moment," the girl said, adjusting her skirt com-
posedly. "Evidently I was right in riding my hunch. Let me
go on reading: 'by four heavily armed vessels flying the
lights of the navy of Hammersmith II. The position of the
liner at that time will be at coded co-ordinates 88-A-theta-
88-aleph-D and-per-se-and. It will' "

"Miss Lje," Weinbaum said. "I'm sorry to interrupt you
again, but what you've said already would justify me in
jailing you at once, no matter how loudly your sponsors
might scream. I don't know about this Interstellar Information
outfit, or whether or not you did receive any such letter as
the one you pretend to be quoting. But I can tell you that
you've shown yourself to be in possession of information
that only yours truly and four other men are supposed to
know. It's already too late to tell you that everything you
say may be held against you; all I can say now is, it's high
time you clammed up!"

"I thought so," she said, apparently not disturbed in the
least. "Then that liner is scheduled to hit those co-ordinates,
and the coded time co-ordinate corresponds with the predicted
Universal Time. Is it also true that the Brindisi will be
carrying a top-secret communication device?"

"Are you deliberately trying to make me imprison you?"
Weinbaum said, gritting his teeth. "Or is this just a stunt,
designed to show me that my own bureau is full of leaks?"

"It could turn into that," Dana admitted. "But it hasn't,
yet. Robin, I've been as honest with you as I'm able to be.
You've had nothing but square deals from me up to now.
I wouldn't yellow-screen you, and you know it. If this un-
known outfit has this information, it might easily have gotten
it from where it hints that it got it:  from the field."

"Impossible."

"Why?"

"Because the information in question hasn't even reached
my own agents in the field yet -- it couldn't possibly have
leaked as far as Hammersmith II or anywhere else, let alone
to the Three Ghosts system! Letters have to be carried on
ships, you know that. If I were to send orders by ultrawave
to my Three Ghosts agent, he'd have to wait three hundred
and twenty-four years to get them. By ship, he can get them
in a little over two months. These particular orders have only
been under way to him five days. Even if somebody has
read them on board the ship that's carrying them, they
couldn't possibly be sent on to the Three Ghosts any faster
than they're traveling now."

Dana nodded her dark head. "All right. Then what are
we left with but a leak in your headquarters here?"

"What, indeed," Weinbaum said grimly. "You'd better tell
me who signed this letter of yours."

"The signature is J. Shelby Stevens."

Weinbaum switched on the intercom. "Margaret, look in
the business register for an outfit called Interstellar Informa-
tion and find out who owns it."

Dana Lje said, "Aren't you interested in the rest of the
prediction?"

"You bet I am. Does it tell you the name of this com-
munications device?"

"Yes," Dana said.

"What is it?"

"The Dirac communicator."

Weinbaum groaned and turned on the intercom again.

"Margaret, send in Dr. Wald. Tell him to drop everything
and gallop. Any luck with the other thing?"

"Yes, sir," the intercom said. "It's a one-man outfit,
wholly owned by a J. Shelby Stevens, in Rico City. It was
first registered this year."

"Arrest him, on suspicion of espionage."

The door swung open and Dr. Wald came in, all six and
a half feet of him. He was extremely blond, and looked
awkward, gentle, and not very intelligent.

"Thor, this young lady is our press nemesis, Dana Lje.
Dana, Dr. Wald is the inventor of the Dirac communicator,
about which you have so damnably much information."

"It's out already?" Dr. Wald said, scanning the girl with
grave deliberation.

"It is, and lots more -- lots more. Dana, you're a good girl
at heart, and for some reason I trust you, stupid though it
is to trust anybody in this job. I should detain you until Year
Day, videocasts or no videocasts. Instead, I'm just going to ask
you to sit on what you've got, and I'm going to explain why."

"Shoot."

"I've already mentioned how slow communication is be-
tween star and star. We have to carry all our letters on
ships, just as we did locally before the invention of the
telegraph. The overdrive lets us beat the speed of light, but
not by much of a margin over really long distances. Do you
understand that?"

"Certainly," Dana said. She appeared a bit nettled, and
Weinbaum decided to give her the full dose at a more rapid
pace. After all, she could be assumed to be better informed
than the average layman.
"What we've needed for a long time, then," he said, "is
some virtually instantaneous method of getting a message
from somewhere to anywhere. Any time lag, no matter how
small it seems at first, has a way of becoming major as longer
and longer distances are involved. Sooner or later we must
have this instantaneous method, or we won't be able to get
messages from one system to another fast enough to hold
our jurisdiction over outlying regions of space."
"Wait a minute," Dana said. "I'd always understood that
ultrawave is faster than light."
"Effectively it is; physically it isn't. You don't understand
that?"
She shook her dark head.
"In a nutshell," Weinbaum said, "ultrawave is radiation,
and all radiation in free space is limited to the speed of light.
The way we hype up ultrawave is to use an old application
of wave-guide  theory,  whereby  the  real  transmission of
energy is at light speed, but an imaginary thing called "phase
velocity" is going faster. But the gain in speed of transmis-
sion isn't largeby ultrawave, for instance, we get a message
to Alpha Centauri in one year instead of nearly four. Over
long distances, that's not nearly enough extra speed."
"Can't it be speeded further?" she said, frowning.
"No. Think of the ultrawave beam between here and
Centaurus III as a caterpillar. The caterpillar himself is
moving quite slowly, just at the speed of light. But the pulses
which pass along his body are going forward faster than he
isand if you've ever watched a caterpillar, you'll know that
that's true.  But there's a physical limit to the number of
pulses you can travel along that caterpillar, and we've already
reached that limit. We've taken phase velocity as far as it
will go.
"That's why we need something faster. For a long time
our relativity theories discouraged hope of anything faster
even the high-phase velocity of a guided wave didn't con-
tradict those theories; it just found a limited, mathematically
imaginary loophole in them. But when Thor here began
looking into the question of the velocity of propagation of
a Dirac pulse, he found the answer. The communicator he
developed does seem to act over long distances, any distance,
instantaneouslyand it may wind up knocking relativity into
a cocked hat."
The girl's face was a study in stunned realization. "I'm
not sure I've taken in all the technical angles," she said.
"But if I'd had any notion of the political dynamite in this
thing"
"you'd have kept out of my office," Weinbaum said
grimly. "A good thing you didn't. The Brindisi is carrying
a model of the Dirac communicator out to the periphery
for a final test; the ship is supposed to get in touch with
me from out there at a given Earth time, which we've
calculated  very  elaborately  to  account  for  the  residual
Lorentz and Milne transformations involved in overdrive
flight, and for a lot of other time phenomena that wouldn't
mean anything at all to you.
"If that signal arrives here at the given Earth time, then
aside from the havoc it will create among the theoretical
physicists whom we decide to let in on itwe will really
have our instant communicator, and can include all of oc-
cupied space in the same time zone. And we'll have a terrific
advantage over any lawbreaker who has to resort to ultra-
wave locally and to letters carried by ships over the long
haul."
"Not," Dr. Wald said sourly, "if it's already leaked out."
"It remains to be seen how much of it has leaked,"
Weinbaum said. "The principle is rather esoteric, Thor, and
the name of the thing alone wouldn't mean much even to
a trained scientist. I gather that Dana's mysterious informant
didn't go into technical details . . . or did he?"
"No," Dana said.
'Tell the truth, Dana. I know that you're suppressing
some of that letter."
The girl started slightly. "All rightyes, I am. But nothing
technical. There's another part of the prediction that lists
the number and class of ships you will send to protect the
Brindisithe prediction says they'll be sufficient, by the way
and I'm keeping that to myself, to see whether or not it
comes true along with the rest. If it does, I think I've hired
myself a correspondent."
"If it does," Weinbaum said, "you've hired yourself a
jailbird. Let's see how much mind reading J. Whatsit Stevens
can do from the subcellar of Fort Yaphank."
3
Weinbaum let himself into Stevens's cell, locking the door
behind him and passing the keys out to the guard. He sat
down heavily on the nearest stool.
Stevens smiled the weak benevolent smile of the very old,
and laid his book aside on the bunk. The book, Weinbaum
knewsince his office had cleared itwas only a volume
of pleasant, harmless lyrics by a New Dynasty poet named
Nims.
"Were our predictions correct, Captain?" Stevens said. His
voice was high and musical, rather like that of a boy soprano.
Weinbaum nodded. "You still won't tell us how you did it?"
"But I already have," Stevens protested. "Our intelligence
network is the best in the Universe, Captain. It is superior
even to your own excellent organization, as events have
shown."
"Its results are superior, that I'll grant," Weinbaum said
glumly.  "If Dana Lje had thrown your letter down her
disposal chute, we would have lost the Brindisi and our
Dirac transmitter both. Incidentally, did your original letter
predict accurately the number of ships we would send?"
Stevens nodded pleasantly, his neatly trimmed white beard
thrusting forward slightly as he smiled.
"I was afraid so," Weinbaum leaned forward. "Do you
have the Dirac transmitter, Stevens?"
"Of course, Captain. How else could my correspondents
report to me with the efficiency you have observed?"
"Then why don't our receivers pick up the broadcasts of
your agents? Dr. Wald says it's inherent in the principle that
Dirac 'casts are picked up by all instruments tuned to receive
them, bar none. And at this stage of the game there are so
few such broadcasts being made that we'd be almost certain
to detect any that weren't coming from our own operatives."
"I decline to answer that question, if you'll excuse the
impoliteness," Stevens said, his voice quavering slightly. "I am
an old man, Captain, and this intelligence agency is my sole
source of income. If I told you how we operated, we would
no longer have any advantage over your own service, except
for the limited freedom from secrecy which we have. I have
been assured by competent lawyers that I have every right
to operate a private investigation bureau, properly licensed,
upon any scale that I may choose; and that I have the right
to keep my methods secret,  as the so-called 'intellectual
assets'  of my firm.  If you wish to use  our services,  well
and good. We will provide them, with absolute guarantees
on all information we furnish you, for an appropriate fee.
But our methods are our own property."
Robin Weinbaum smiled twistedly. "I'm not a naive man,
Mr. Stevens," he said. "My service is hard on naivete. You
know as well as I do that the government can't allow you
to operate on a free-lance basis, supplying top-secret informa-
tion to anyone who can pay the price, or even free of charge
to video columnists on a 'test' basis, even though you arrive
at every jot of that information independently of espionage
which I still haven't entirely ruled out, by the way. If you
can duplicate this Brindisi performance at will, we will have
to have your services exclusively. In short, you become a
hired civilian arm of my own bureau."
"Quite," Stevens said, returning the smile in a fatherly
way. "We anticipated that, of course. However, we have
contracts with other governments to consider; Erskine, in
particular. If we are to work exclusively for Earth, neces-
sarily our price will include compensation for renouncing our
other accounts."
"Why should it? Patriotic public servants work for their
government at a loss, if they can't work for it any other way."
"I am quite aware of that. I am quite prepared to renounce
my other interests. But I do require to be paid."
"How much?" Weinbaum said, suddenly aware that his
fists were clenched so tightly that they hurt.
Stevens appeared to consider, nodding his flowery white
poll in senile deliberation. "My associates would have to be
consulted. Tentatively, however, a sum equal to the present
appropriation of your bureau would do, pending further
negotiations."
Weinbaum shot to his feet, eyes wide. "You old buc-
caneer! You know damned well that I can't spend my entire
appropriation on a single civilian service! Did it ever occur
to you that most of the civilian outfits working for us are
on cost-plus contracts, and that our civilian executives are
being paid just a credit a year, by their own choice? You're
demanding nearly two thousand credits an hour from your
own government, and claiming the legal protection that the
government affords you at the same time, in order to let
those fanatics on Erskine run up a higher bid!"
"The price is not unreasonable," Stevens said. "The service
is worth the price."
"That's where you're wrong! We have the discoverer of
the machine working for us. For less than half the sum
you're asking, we can find the application of the device that
you're trading onof that you can be damned sure."
"A dangerous gamble. Captain."
"Perhaps. We'll soon see!" Weinbaum glared at the placid
face. "I'm forced to tell you that you're a free man, Mr.
Stevens. We've been unable to show that you came by your
information by any illegal method. You had classified facts
in your possession, but no classified documents, and it's
your privilege as a citizen to make guesses, no matter how
educated.
"But we'll catch up with you sooner or later. Had you
been reasonable, you might have found yourself in a very
good position with us, your income as assured as any political
income can be, and your person respected to the hilt. Now,
however, you're subject to censorshipyou have no idea
how humiliating that can be, but I'm going to see to it that
you find out. There'11 be no more newsbeats for Dana Lje,
or for anyone else. I want to see every word of copy that
you file with any client outside the bureau. Every word that
is of use to me will be used, and you'll be paid the statutory
one cent a word for itthe same rate that the FBI pays for
anonymous gossip. Everything I don't find useful will be
killed without clearance. Eventually we'll have the modifica-
tion of the Dirac that you're using, and when that happens,
you'll be so flat broke that a pancake with a harelip could
spit right over you."
Weinbaum paused for a moment, astonished at his own
fury.
Stevens's clarinetlike voice began to sound in the window-
less cavity. "Captain, I have no doubt that you can do this
to me, at least incompletely. But it will prove fruitless. I will
give you a prediction, at no charge. It is guaranteed, as are
all our predictions. It is this: You will never find that mod-
ification. Eventually, I will give it to you, on my own terms,
but you will never find it for yourself, nor will you force it
out of me. In the meantime, not a word of copy will be
filed with you; for, despite the fact that you are an arm of
the government, I can well afford to wait you out."
"Bluster," Weinbaum said.
"Fact. Yours is the blusterloud talk based on nothing
more than a hope. I, however, know whereof I speak. . . .
But let us conclude this discussion. It serves no purpose;
you will need to see my points made the hard way. Thank
you for giving me my freedom. We will talk again under
different circumstances onlet me see; ah, yes, on June 9
of the year 2091. That year is, I believe, almost upon us."
Stevens picked up his book again, nodding at Weinbaum,
his expression harmless and kindly, his hands showing the
marked tremor of paralysis agitans. Weinbaum moved help-
lessly to the door and flagged the turnkey. As the bars closed
behind him, Stevens's voice called out: "Oh, yes; and a
Happy New Year, Captain."
Weinbaym blasted his way back into his own office, at
least twice as mad as the proverbial nest of hornets, and at
the same time rather dismally aware of his own probable
future. If Stevens's second prediction turned out to be as
phenomenally accurate as his first had been, Capt. Robin
Weinbaum would soon be peddling a natty set of second-
hand uniforms.
He glared down at Margaret Soames, his receptionist
She glared right back; she had known him too long to be
intimidated.
"Anything?" he said.
"Dr. Wald's waiting for you in your office. There are some
field reports, and a couple of Diracs on your private tape.
Any luck with the old codger?"
"That," he said crushingly, "is Top Secret."
"Poof. That means that nobody still knows the answer
but J. Shelby Stevens."
He collapsed suddenly. "You're so right. That's just what
it does mean. But we'll bust him wide open sooner or later.
We've got to."
"You'll do it," Margaret said. "Anything else for me?"
"No. Tip off the clerical staff that there's a half holiday
today, then go take in a stereo or a steak or something your-
self. Dr. Wald and I have a few private wires to pull . . .
and unless I'm sadly mistaken, a private bottle of aquavit
to empty."
"Right," the receptionist said. "Tie one on for me, Chief.
I understand that beer is the best chaser for aquavitI'll
have some sent up."
"If you should return after I am suitably squiffed," Wein-
baum said, feeling a little better already, "I will kiss you for
your thoughtfulness. That should keep you at your stereo
at least twice through the third feature."
As he went on through the door of his own office, she
said demurely behind him, "It certainly should."
As soon as the door closed, however, his mood became
abruptly almost as black as before. Despite his comparative
youthhe was now only fifty-fivehe had been in the
service a long time, and he needed no one to tell him the
possible consequences which might flow from possession by
a private citizen of the Dirac communicator. If there was
ever to be a Federation of Man in the Galaxy, it was within
the power of J. Shelby Stevens to ruin it before it had fairly
gotten started. And there seemed to be nothing at all that
could be done about it.
"Hello, Thor," he said glumly. "Pass the bottle."
"Hello, Robin. I gather things went badly. Tell me about
it."
Briefly, Weinbaum told him.  "And the worst of it," he
finished, "is that Stevens himself predicts that we won't find
the application of the Dirac that he's using, and that even-
tually we'll have to buy it at his price. Somehow I believe
himbut I can't see how it's possible. If I were to tell
Congress that I was going to spend my entire appropriation
for a single civilian service, I'd be out on my ear within the
next three sessions."
"Perhaps that isn't his real price," the scientist suggested.
"If he wants to barter, he'd naturally begin with a demand
miles above what he actually wants."
"Sure, sure . . . but frankly, Thor, I'd hate to give the old
reprobate even a single credit if I could get out of it."
Weinbaum sighed. "Well, let's see what's come in from
the field."
Thor Wald moved silently away from Weinbaum's desk
while the officer unfolded it and set up the Dirac screen.
Stacked neatly next to the ultraphonea device Weinbaum
had been thinking of, only a few days ago, as permanently
outmodedwere the tapes Margaret had mentioned. He fed
the first one into the Dirac and turned the main toggle to
the position labeled START.
Immediately the whole screen went pure white and the
audio speakers emitted an almost instantly end-stopped blare
of sounda beep which, as Weinbaum already knew, made
up a continuous spectrum from about 30 cycles per second
to well above  18,000 cps. Then both the light and the
noise were gone as if they had never been, and were replaced
by the familiar face and voice of Weinbaum's local ops chief
in Rico City.
"There's nothing unusual in the way of transmitters in
Stevens's offices here," the operative said without preamble.
"And there isn't any local Interstellar Information staff,
except for one stenographer, and she's as dumb as they come.
About all we could get from her is that Stevens is 'such a
sweet old man.' No possibility that she's faking it; she's
genuinely stupid, the kind that thinks Betelgeuse is something
Indians use to darken their skins. We looked for some sort
of list or code table that would give us a line on Stevens's
field staff, but that was another dead end. Now we're main-
taining a twenty-four-hour Dinwiddie watch on the place from
a joint across the street. Orders?"
Weinbaum dictated to the blank stretch of tape which
followed: "Margaret, next time you send any Dirac tapes
in here, cut that damnable beep off them first. Tell the boys
in Rico City that Stevens has been released, and that I'm
proceeding for an Order In Security to tap his ultraphone
and his local linesthis is one case where I'm sure we can
persuade the court that tapping's necessary. Alsoand be
damned sure you code thistoll them to proceed with the
tap immediately and to maintain it regardless of whether
or not the court O.K.s it. I'll thumbprint a Full Respon-
sibility Confession for them. We  can't afford to play pat-
a-cake with Stevensthe potential is just too damned big.
And oh, yes, Margaret, send the message by carrier, and
send out general orders to everybody concerned not to use
the Dirac again except when distance and time rule every
other medium out. Stevens has already admitted that he can
receive Dirac 'casts."
He put down the mike and stared morosely for a moment
at the beautiful Eridanean scrollwood of his desktop. Wald
coughed inquiringly and retrieved the aquavit.
"Excuse me, Robin," he said, "but I should think that would
work both ways."
"So should 1. And yet the fact is that we've never picked
up so much as a whisper from either Stevens or his agents.
I can't think of any way that could be pulled, but evidently
it can."
"Well, let's rethink the problem, and see what we get,"
Wald said. "I didn't want to say so in front of the young
lady, for obvious reasons1 mean Miss Lje, of course, not
Margaretbut the truth is that the Dirac is essentially a
simple mechanism in principle. I seriously doubt that there's
any way to transmit a message from it which can't be
detectedand an examination of the theory with that proviso
in mind might give us something new."
"What proviso?" Weinbaum said. Thor Wald left him
behind rather often these days.
"Why, that a Dirac transmission doesn't necessarily go to
all  communicators  capable  of  receiving  it.  If  that's  true,
then the reasons why it is true should emerge from the
theory."
"I see. O.K., proceed on that line. I've been looking at
Stevens's dossier while you were talking, and it's an absolute
desert. Prior to the opening of the office in Rico City, there's
no dope whatever on J. Shelby Stevens. The man as good
as rubbed my nose in the fact that he's using a pseud when
I first talked to him. I asked him what the T in his name
stood for, and he said, 'Oh, let's make it Jerome.' But who
the man behind the pseud is . . ."
"Is it possible that he's using his own initials?"
"No," Weinbaum said. "Only the dumbest ever do that,
or transpose syllables, or retain any connection at all with
their real names. Those are the people who are in serious
emotional trouble, people who drive themselves into an-
onymity, but leave clues strewn all around the landscape
those clues are really a cry for help, for discovery. Of course
we're working on that anglewe can't neglect anything
but J. Shelby Stevens isn't that kind of case, I'm sure."
Weinbaum stood up abruptly. "O.K., Thorwhat's first on
your technical program?"
"Well . . . I suppose we'll have to start with checking the
frequencies we use. We're going on Dirac's assumption
and it works very well, and always hasthat a positron in
motion  through  a  crystal  lattice  is  accompanied  by
de Broglie waves which are transforms of the waves of an
electron in motion somewhere else in the Universe. Thus if
we control the frequency and path of the positron, we
control the placement of the electronwe cause it to appear,
so to speak, in the circuits of a communicator somewhere
else. After that, reception is just a matter of amplifying the
bursts and reading the signal."
Wald scowled and shook his blond head. "If Stevens is
getting out messages which we don't pick up, my first as-
sumption would be that he's worked out a fine-tuning circuit
that's more delicate than ours, and is more or less sneaking
his messages under ours. The only way that could be done,
as far as I can see at the moment, is by something really
fantastic in the way of exact frequency control of his positron
gun. If so, the logical step for us is to go back to the
beginning of our tests and rerun our diffractions to see if
we can refine our measurements of positron frequencies."
The scientist looked so inexpressibly gloomy as he offered
this conclusion that a pall of hopelessness settled over Wein-
baum in sheer sympathy. "You don't look as if you expected
that to uncover anything new."
"I don't. You see, Robin, things are different in physics
now than they used to be in the twentieth century. In those
days, it was always presupposed that physics was limitless
the classic statement was made by Weyl, who said that
'It is the nature of a real thing to be inexhaustible in content.*
We know now that that's not so, except in a remote, as-
sociational sort of way. Nowadays, physics is a defined and
self-limited science; its scope is still prodigious, but we can
no longer think of it as endless.
"This is better established in particle physics than in any
other branch of the science. Half of the trouble physicists
of the last century had with Euclidean geometryand hence
the reason why they evolved so many recomplicated theories
of relativityis that it's a geometry of lines, and thus can
be subdivided infinitely. When Cantor proved that there really
is an infinity, at least mathematically speaking, that seemed
to clinch the case for the possibility of a really infinite
physical universe, too."
Wald's eyes grew vague, and he paused to gulp down a
slug of the licorice-flavored aquavit which would have made
Weinbaum's every hair stand on end.
"I remember," Wald said, "the man who taught me theory
of sets at Princeton, many years ago. He used to say: 'Cantor
teaches us that there are many kinds of infinities. There was
a crazy old mani' "
Weinbaum rescued the bottle hastily. "So go on, Thor."
"Oh." Wald biinked. "Yes. Well, what we know now is
that the geometry which applies to ultimate particles, like
the positron,  isn't Euclidean  at  all.  It's  Pythagoreana
geometry of points, not lines. Once you've measured one of
those points, and it doesn't matter what kind of quantity
you're measuring, you're down as far as you can go. At that
point, the Universe becomes discontinuous, and no further
refinement is possible.
"And I'd say that our positron-frequency measurements
have already gotten that far down. There isn't another el-
ement in the Universe denser than plutonium, yet we get
the same frequency values by diffraction through plutonium
crystals that we get through osmium crystalsthere's not the
slightest difference. If J. Shelby Stevens is operating in terms
of fractions of those values, then he's doing what an organist
would call 'playing in the cracks'which is certainly some-
thing you can think about doing, but something that's in
actuality impossible to do. Hoop."
"Hoop?" Weinbaum said.
"Sorry. A hiccup only."
"Oh. Well, maybe Stevens has rebuilt the organ?"
"If he has rebuilt the metrical frame of the Universe to
accommodate a private skip-tracing firm," Wald said firmly,
"I for one see no reason why we can't countercheck him
hoopby declaring the whole cosmos null and void."
"All right, all right," Weinbaum said, grinning. "I didn't
mean to push your analogy right over the edge1 was just
asking. But let's get to work on it anyhow. We can't just sit
here and let Stevens get away with it. if this frequency angle
turns out to be as hopeless as it seems, we'll try something
else."
Wald eyed the aquavit bottle owlishly. "It's a very pretty
problem," he said. "Have I ever sung you the song we have
in Sweden called 'Nat-og-Dag?' "
"Hoop," Weinbaum said, to his own surprise, in a high
falsetto. "Excuse me. No. Let's hear it."
The computer occupied an entire floor of the Security
building, its seemingly identical banks laid out side by side
on the floor along an advanced pathological state of Peano's
"space-filling curve." At the current business end of the line
was a master control board with a large television screen at
its center, at which Dr. Wald was stationed, with Weinbaum
looking, silently but anxiously, over his shoulder.
The screen itself showed a pattern which, except that it
was drawn in green light against a dark gray background,
strongly resembled the grain in a piece of highly polished
mahogany. Photographs of similar patterns were stacked on
a small table to Dr. Wald's right; several had spilled over
onto the floor.
"Well, there it is," Wald sighed at length. "And I won't
struggle to keep myself from saying 1 told you so.' What
you've had me do here, Robin, is to reconfirm about half the
basic postulates of particle physicswhich is why it took so
long, even though it was the first project we started." He
snapped off the screen. "There are no cracks for J. Shelby
to play in. That's definite."
"If you'd said 'That's flat,' you would have made a joke,"
Weinbaum said sourly. "Look . . . isn't there still a chance of
error? If not on your part, Thor, then in the computer? After
all, it's set up to work only with the unit charges of modern
physics; mightn't we have to disconnect the banks that con-
tain that  bias  before  the machine  will  follow  the  frac-
tional-charge instructions we give it?"
" 'Disconnect,' he says," Wald groaned, mopping his brow
reflectively. "The bias exists everywhere in the machine, my
friend, because it functions everywhere on those same unit
charges. It wasn't a matter of subtracting banks; we had to
add one with a bias all its own, to countercorrect the cor-
rections the computer would otherwise apply to the instruc-
tions. The technicians thought I was crazy. Now, five months
later, I've proved it."
Weinbaum grinned in spite of himself. "What about the
other projects?"
"All donesome time back, as a matter of fact. The staff
and I checked every single Dirac tape we've received since
you released J. Shelby from Yaphank, for any sign of inter-
modulation, marginal signals, or anything else of the kind.
There's nothing. Robin, absolutely nothing. That's our net
result, all around."
"Which leaves us just where we started," Weinbaum said.
"All the monitoring projects came to the same dead end; I
strongly suspect that Stevens hasn't risked any further calls
from his home office to his field staff, even though he seemed
confident that we'd never intercept such callsas we haven't.
Even our local wire tapping hasn't turned up anything but
calls by Stevens's secretary, making appointments for him
with various clients, actual and potential. Any information
he's selling these days he's passing on in personand not in
his office, either, because we've got bugs planted all over that
and haven't heard a thing."
'That must limit his range of operation enormously,"
Wald objected.
Weinbaum nodded. "Without a doubtbut he shows no
signs of being bothered by it. He can't have sent any tips to
Erskine recently, for instance, because our last tangle with
that crew came out very well for us, even though we had to
use the Dirac to send the orders to our squadron out there.
If he overheard us, he didn't even try to pass the word. Just
as he said, he's sweating us out" Weinbaum paused. "Wait a
minute, here comes Margaret. And by the length of her
stride, I'd say she's got something particularly nasty on her
mind."
"You bet I do," Margaret Soames said vindictively. "And
it'll blow plenty of lids around here, or I miss my guess. The
1. D. squad has finally pinned down J. Shelby Stevens. They
did it with the voice-comparator alone."
"How does that work?" Wald said interestedly.
"Blink microphone," Weinbaum said impatiently. "Isolates
inflections on single, normally stressed syllables and matches
them. Standard 1. D. searching technique, on a case of this
kind, but it takes so long that we usually get the quarry by
other means before it pays off. Well, don't stand there like a
dummy, Margaret. Who is he?
" 'He,' " Margaret said, "is your sweetheart of the video
waves, Miss Dana Lje."
"They're crazy!" Wald said, staring at her.
Weinbaum came slowly out of his first shock of stunned
disbelief. "No, Thor," he said finally. "No, it figures. If a
woman is going to go in for disguises, there are always two
she can assume outside her own sex: a young boy, and a very
old man. And Dana's an actress; that's no news to us."
"Butbut why did she do it, Robin?"
"That's what we're going to find out right now. So we
wouldn't get the Dirac modification by ourselves, ehl Well,
there are other ways of getting answers besides particle
physics. Margaret, do you have a pick-up order out for that
girl?"
"No," the receptionist said. "This is one chestnut I wanted
to see you pull out for yourself. You give me the authority,
and I send the ordernot before."
"Spiteful child. Send it, then, and glory in my gritted
teeth.  Come  on,  Thorlet's  put  the  nutcracker  on  this
chestnut."
As they were leaving the computer floor, Weinbaum
stopped suddenly in his tracks and began to mutter in an
almost inaudible voice.
Wald said, "What's the matter, Robin?"
"Nothing. I keep being brought up short by those pre-
dictions. What's the date?"
"M'm . . . June 9. Why?"
"It's  the  exact  date  that  'Stevens'  predicted  we'd  meet
again, damn it! Something tells me that this isn't going to
be as simple as it looks."
If Dana L)'e had any idea of what she was in forand
considering the fact that she was 'J. Shelby Stevens' it had to
be assumed that she didthe knowledge seemed not to make
her at all fearful. She sat as composedly as ever before
Weinbaum's desk, smoking her eternal cigarette, and waited,
one dimpled knee pointed directly at the bridge of the
officer's nose.
"Dana," Weinbaum said, "this time we're going to get all
the answers, and we're not going to be gentle about it. Just
iii case you're not aware of the fact, there are certain laws
relating to giving false information to a security officer, under
which we could heave you in prison for a minimum of fifteen
years. By application of the statutes on using communications
to defraud, plus various local laws  against transvestism,
pseudonymity and so on, we could probably pile up enough
additional short sentences to keep you in Yaphank until you
really do grow a beard. So I'd advise you to open up."
"I have every intention of opening up," Dana said. "I
know, practically word for word, how this interview is going
to proceed, what information I'm going to give you, just
when I'm going to give it to youand what you're going to
pay me for it. I knew all that many months ago. So there
would be no point in my holding out on you."
"What you're saying, Miss Lje," Thor Wald said in a re-
signed voice, "is that the future is fixed, and that you can
read it, in every essential detail."
"Quite right. Dr. Wald. Both those things are true."
There was a brief silence.
"All right," Weinbaum said grimly. "Talk."
"All right, Captain Weinbaum, pay me," Dana said calmly.
Weinbaum snorted.
"But I'm quite serious," she said. "You still don't know
what I know about the Dirac communicator. I won't be
forced to tell it, by threat of prison or by any other threat.
You see, I know for a fact that you aren't going to send me
to prison, or give me drugs, or do anything else of that kind.
I know for a fact, instead, that you are going to pay meso
I'd be very foolish to say a word until you do. After all, it's
quite a secret you're buying. Once I tell you what it is, you
and the entire service will be able to read the future as I do,
and then the information will be valueless to me."
Weinbaum was completely speechless for a moment.
Finally he said, "Dana, you have a heart of purest brass, as
well as a knee with an invisible gunsight on it. I say that
I'm not going to give you my appropriation, regardless of
what the future may or may not say about it. I'm not going
to give it to you because the way my governmentand yours
runs things makes such a price impossible. Or is that really
your price?"
"It's my real price . . . but it's also an alternative. Call
it my second choice. My first choice, which means the price
I'd settle for, comes in two parts: (a) to be taken into your
service as a responsible officer; and, (b) to be married to
Captain Robin Weinbaum."
Weinbaum sailed up out of his chair. He felt as though
copper-colored flames a foot long were shooting out of each
of his ears.
"Of all the" he began. There his voice failed completely.
From behind him, where Wald was standing, came some-
thing like a large, Scandinavian-model guffaw being choked
into insensibility.
Dana herself seemed to be smiling a little.
"You see," she said, "I don't point my best and most
accurate knee at every man I meet."
Weinbaum sat down again, slowly and carefully. "Walk,
do not run, to nearest exit," he said. "Women and childlike
security officers first. Miss L]'e, are you trying to sell me the
notion that you went through this elaborate hanky-panky
beard and allout of a burning passion for my dumpy and
underpaid person?"
"Not entirely," Dana L]'e said. "I want to be in the bureau,
too, as I said. Let me confront you, though. Captain, with
a fact of life that doesn't seem to have occurred to you at all.
Do you accept as a fact that I can read the future in detail,
and that that, to be possible at all, means that the future is
fixed?"
"Since Thor seems able to accept it, I suppose I can too
provisionally."
"There's nothing provisional about it," Dana said firmly.
"Now, when I first came upon thisuh, this gimmickquite
a while back, one of the first things that I found out was
that I was going to go through the 'J. Shelby Stevens' mas-
querade, force myself onto the staff of the bureau, and marry
you, Robin. At the time, I was both astonished and com-
pletely rebellious. I didn't want to be on the bureau staff; I
liked my free-lance life as a video commentator. I didn't want
to marry you, though I wouldn't have been averse to living
with you for a whilesay a month or so. And above all, the
masquerade struck me as ridiculous.
"But the facts kept staring me in the face. I was going to
do all those things. There were no alternatives, no fanciful
'branches of time,' no decision-points that might be altered
to make the future change. My future, like yours, Dr. Wald's,
and everyone else's, was fixed. It didn't matter a snap
whether or not I had a decent motive for what I was going
to do; I was going to do it anyhow. Cause and effect, as I
could see for myself, just don't exist. One event follows an-
other because events are just as indestructible in space-time
as matter and energy are.
"It was the bitterest of all pills.  It will take me many
years to swallow it completely, and you too. Dr. Wald will
come around a little sooner, I think. At any rate, once I was
intellectually convinced that all this was so, I had to protect
my own sanity. I knew that I couldn't alter what I was going
to do, but the least I could do to protect myself was to supply
myself with motives. Or, in other words, just plain rationali-
zations. That much, it seems, we're free to do; the conscious-
ness of the observer is just along for the ride through time,
and can't alter eventsbut it can comment, explain, invent.
That's fortunate, for none of us could stand going through
motions which were truly free of what we think of as
personal significances.
"So I supplied myself with the obvious motives. Since I
was going to be married to you and couldn't get out of it, I
set out to convince myself that I loved you. Now I do. Since
I was going to join the bureau staff, I thought over all the
advantages that it might have over video commentating, and
found that they made a respectable list. Those are my
motives.
"But I had no such motives at the beginning. Actually,
there are never motives behind actions. All actions are fixed.
What we called motives evidently are rationalizations by the
helpless observing consciousness, which is intelligent enough
to smell an event comingand, since it cannot avert the
event, instead cooks up reasons for wanting it to happen."
"Wow," Dr. Wald said, inelegantly but with considerable
force.
"Either 'wow' or 'balderdash' seems to be called for1
can't quite decide which," Weinbaum agreed. "We know that
Dana is an actress, Thor, so let's not fall off the apple tree
quite yet. Dana, I've been saving the really hard question for
the last. That question is: How? How did you arrive at this
modification of the Dirac transmitter? Remember, we know
your background, where we didn't know that of *J. Shelby
Stevens.' You're not a scientist. There were some fairly high-
powered intellects among your distant relatives, but that's as
close as you come."
"I'm going to give you several answers to that question,"
Dana Lje said. "Pick the one you like best. They're all true,
but they tend to contradict each other here and there.
'To begin with, you're right about my relatives, of course.
If you'll check your dossier again, though, you'll discover
that those so-called 'distant' relatives were the last surviving
members of my family besides myself. When they died, sec-
ond and fourth and ninth cousins though they were, then-
estates reverted to me, and among their effects I found a
sketch of a possible instantaneous communicator based on de
Broglie-wave inversion. The material was in very rough
form, and mostly beyond my comprehension, because I am,
as you say, no scientist myself. But I was interested; I could
see, dimly, what such a thing might be worthand not only
in money.
"My interest was fanned by two coincidencestfie kind
of coincidences that cause-and-effect just can't allow, but
which seem to happen all the same in the world of un-
changeable events. For most of my adult life, I've been in
communications industries of one kind or another, mostly
branches of video. I had communications equipment around
me constantly, and I had coffee and doughnuts with com-
munications engineers every day. First I picked up the
jargon; then, some of the procedures; and eventually a little
real knowledge. Some of the things I learned can't be gotten
any other way. Some other things are ordinarily available
only to highly educated people like Dr. Wald here, and came
to me by accident, in horseplay, between kisses, and a hun-
dred other waysall natural to the environment of a video
network."
Weinbaum found, to his own astonishment, that the "be-
tween kisses" clause did not sit very well in his chest. He
said,  with  unintentional  brusqueness:  "What's  the  other
coincidence?"
"A leak in your own staff."
"Dana, you ought to have that set to music."
"Suit yourself."
"I can't suit myself," Weinbaum said petulantly. "I work
for the government. Was this leak direct to you?"
"Not at first. That was why I kept insisting to you in
person that there might be such a leak, and why I finally
began to hint about it in public, on my program. I was hoping
that you'd be able to seal it up inside the bureau before my
first rather tenuous contact with it got lost. When I didn't
succeed in provoking you into protecting yourself, I took the
risk of making direct contact with the leak myselfand the
first piece of secret information that came to me through it
was the final point I needed to put my Dirac communicator
together. When it was all assembled, it did more than just
communicate. It predicted. And I can tell you why."
Weinbaum said thoughtfully, "I don't find this very hard
to accept, so far. Pruned of the philosophy, it even makes
some sense of the 'J. Shelby Stevens' affair. I assume that by
letting the old gentleman become known as somebody who
knew more about the Dirac transmitter than I did, and who
wasn't averse to negotiating with anybody who had money,
you kept the leak working through yourather than trans-
mitting data directly to unfriendly governments."
"It did work out that way," Dana said. "But that wasn't
the genesis or the purpose of the Stevens masquerade. I've
already given you the whole explanation of how that came
about."
"Well, you'd better name me that leak, before the man
gets away."
"When the price is paid, not before. It's too late to prevent
a getaway, anyhow. In the meantime, Robin, I want to go
on and tell you the other answer to your question about how
I was able to find this particular Dirac secret, and you didn't.
What answers I've given you up to now have been cause-and-
effect answers, with which we're all more comfortable. But I
want to impress on you that all apparent cause-and-effect
relationships are accidents. There is no such thing as a cause,
and no such thing as an effect. I found the secret because I
found it; that event was fixed; that certain circumstances
seem to explain why I found it, in the old cause-and-effect
terms, is irrelevant. Similarly, with all your superior equip-
ment and brains, you didn't find it for one reason, and one
reason alone: because you didn't find it. The history of the
future says you didn't."
"I pays my money and I takes no choice, eh?" Weinbaum
said ruefully.
"I'm afraid soand I don't like it any better than you do."
"Thor, what's your opinion of all this?"
"It's just faintly flabbergasting," Wald said soberly. "How-
ever, it hangs together. The deterministic universe which Miss
Lje paints was a common feature of the old relativity
theories, and as sheer speculation has an even longer history.
I would say that, in the long run, how much credence we
place in the story as a whole will rest upon her method of,
as she calls it, reading the future. If it is demonstrable beyond
any doubt, then the rest becomes perfectly crediblephilos-
ophy and all. If it doesn't, then what remains is an admirable
job of acting, plus some metaphysics which, while self-con-
sistent, is not original with Miss Lje."
"That sums up the case as well as if I'd coached you, Dr.
Wald," Dana said. "I'd like to point out one more thing. If
I can read the future, then 'J. Shelby Stevens' never had any
need for a staff of field operatives, and he never needed to
send a single Dirac message which you might intercept. All he
needed to do was to make predictions from his readings,
which he knew to be infallible; no private espionage network
had to be involved."
"I see that," Weinbaum said dryly. "All right, Dana, let's
put the proposition this way: / do not believe you. Much of
what you say is probably true, but in totality I believe it
to be false. On the other hand, if you're telling the whole
truth, you certainly deserve a place on the bureau staffit
would be dangerous as hell not to have you with usand
the marriage is a more or less minor matter, except to you
and me. You can have that with no strings attached; I don't
want to be bought, any more than you would.
"So: if you will tell me where the leak is, we will consider
that part of the question closed. I make that condition not as
a price, but because I don't want to get myself engaged to
somebody who might be shot as a spy within a month."
"Fair enough," Dana said. "Robin, your leak is Margaret
Soames. She is an Erskine operative, and nobody's bubble-
brain. She's a highly trained technician."
"Well, I'll be damned," Weinbaum said in astonishment.
"Then she's already flown the coopshe was the one who
first told me we'd identified you. She must have taken on that
job in order to hold up delivery long enough to stage an exit."
"That's right. But you'll catch her, day after tomorrow.
And you are now a hooked fish, Robin."
There was another suppressed burble from Thor Wald.
"I accept the fate happily," Weinbaum said, eying the
gunsight knee. "Now, if you will tell me how you work your
swami trick, and if it backs up everything you've said to
the letter, as you claim, I'll see to it that you're also taken
into the bureau and that all charges against you are quashed.
Otherwise, I'll probably have to kiss the bride between the
bars of a cell."
Dana smiled. "The secret is very simple. It's in the beep."
Weinbaum's jaw dropped. "The beep? The Dirac noise?"
"That's right. You didn't find it out because you considered
the beep to be just a nuisance, and ordered Miss Soames to
cut it off all tapes before sending them in to you. Miss
Soames, who had some inkling of what the beep meant, was
more than happy to do so, leaving the reading of the beep
exclusively to 'J. Shelby Stevens'who she thought was going
to take on Erskine as a client."
"Explain," Thor Wald said, looking intense.
"Just as you assumed, every Dirac message that is sent is
picked up by every receiver that is capable of detecting it
Every receivermcluding the first one ever built, which is
yours, Dr. Wald, through the hundreds of thousands of them
which will exist throughout the Galaxy in the twenty-fourth
century, to the untold millions which will exist in the thirtieth
century, and so on. The Dirac beep is the simultaneous re-
ception of every one of the Dirac messages which have ever
been sent, or ever wilt be sent. Incidentally, the cardinal
number of the total of those messages is a relatively small
and of course finite number; it's far below really large finite
numbers such as the number of electrons in the universe,
even when you break each and every message down into
individual 'bits' and count those."
"Of course," Dr. Wald said softly. "Of course! But, Miss
Lje . . . how do you tune for an individual message? We
tried fractional positron frequencies, and got nowhere."
"I didn't even know fractional positron frequencies existed,"
Dana confessed. "No, it's simpleso simple that a lucky
layman like me could arrive at it. You tune individual
messages out of the beep by time lag, nothing more. All the
messages arrive at the same instant, in the smallest fraction
of time that exists, something called a 'chronon.' "
"Yes," Wald said. "The time it takes one electron to move
from one quantum-level to another. That's the Pythagorean
point of time measurement."
"Thank you. Obviously no gross physical receiver can re-
spond to a message that brief, or at least that's what I
thought at first. But because there are relay and switching
delays, various forms of feedback and so on, in the apparatus
itself, the beep arrives at the output end as a complex pulse
which has been 'splattered' along the time axis for a full
second or more. That's an effect which you can exaggerate
by recording the 'splattered' beep on a high-speed tape, the
same way you would record any event that you wanted to
study in slow motion. Then you tune up the various failure-
points in your receiver, to exaggerate one failure, minimize
aB the others, and use noise-suppressing techniques to cut
out the background."
Thor Wald frowned. "You'd still have a considerable
garble when you were through. You'd have to sample the
messages"
"Which is just what I did; Robin's little lecture to me
about the ultrawave gave me that hint. I set myself to find
out how the ultrawave channel carries so many messages at
once, and I discovered that you people sample the incoming
pulses every thousandth of a second and pass on one pip
only when the wave deviates in a certain way from the mean.
I didn't really believe it would work on the Dirac beep, but
it turned out just  as  well:  90 percent  as  intelligible  as  the
original transmission  after it came through the  smearing
device. I'd already got enough from the beep to put my
plan in motion, of coursebut now every voice message in
it was  available,  and  crystal-clear:  If you  select  three  pips
every thousandth of second, you can even pick up an intel-
ligible transmission of musica little razzy, but good enough
to identify the instruments that are playingand that's a
very close test of any communications device."
"There's a question of detail here that doesn't quite follow,"
said Weinbaum, for whom the technical talk was becoming
a little too thick to fight through.  "Dana, you say that you
knew the course this conversation was going to takeyet
it isn't being Dirac-recorded, nor can I see  any reason why
any summary of it would be sent out on the Dirac after-
wards."
"That's true, Robin. However, when I leave here, I will
make such a transcast myself, on my own Dirac. Obviously
I willbecause I've already picked it up, from the beep."
"In other words, you're going to call yourself upmonths
ago."
"That's it," Dana said. "It's not as useful a technique as
you might think at first, because it's dangerous to make
such broadcasts while a situation is still developing. You
can safely 'phone back' details only after the given situation
has gone to completion, as a chemist might put it. Once
you know, however, that when you use the Dirac you're
dealing with time, you can coax some very strange things
out of the instrument."
She paused and smiled. "I have heard," she said conver-
sationally,  "the voice of the President of our Galaxy,  in
3480, announcing the federation of the Milky Way and the
Magellanic Clouds. I've heard the commander of a world-
line cruiser, traveling from 8873 to 8704 along the world
line of the planet Hathshepa, which circles a star on the
rim of NGC 4725, calling for help across eleven million
light-yearsbut what kind of help he was calling for, or
will be calling for, is beyond my comprehension. And many
other things. When you check on me, you'll hear these
things tooand you'll wonder what many of them mean.
"And you'll listen to them even more closely than I did,
in the hope of finding out whether or not anyone was able
to understand in time to help."
Weinbaum and Wald looked dazed.
Her voice became a little more somber. "Most of the
voices in the Dirac beep are like thatthey're cries for help,
which you can overhear decades or centuries before the
senders get into trouble. You'll feel obligated to answer every
one, to try to supply the help that's needed. And you'll
listen to the succeeding messages and say:  'Did wewill
we get there in time? Did we understand in time?'
"And in most cases you won't be sure. You'll know the
future, but not what most of it means. The farther into the
future you travel with the machine, the more incomprehen-
sible the messages become, and so you're reduced to telling
yourself that time will, after all, have to pass by at its own
pace, before enough of the surrounding events can emerge
to make those remote messages clear.
"The long-run effect, as far as I can think it through,
is not going to be that of omniscienceof our consciousness
being extracted entirely from the time stream and allowed
to view its whole sweep from one side. Instead, the Dirac
in effect simply slides the bead of consciousness forward
from the present a certain distance. Whether it's five hundred
of five thousand years still remains to be seen. At that point
the law of diminishing returns sets inor the noise factor
begins to overbalance the information, take your choiceand
the observer is reduced to traveling in time at the same old
speed. He's just a bit ahead of himself."
"You've thought a great deal about this," Wald said
slowly. "I dislike to think of what might have happened had
some less conscientious person stumbled on the beep."
"That wasn't in the cards," Dana said.
In the ensuing quiet, Weinbaum felt a faint, irrational
sense of let-down, of something which had promised more
than had been deliveredrather like the taste of fresh bread
as compared to its smell, or the discovery that Thor Wald's
Swedish "folk song" Nat-og-Dag was only Cole Porter's
Night and Day in another language. He recognized the
feeling: it was the usual emotion of the hunter when the hunt
is  over,  the  born  detective's  professional  version  of the
past coitum tristre. After looking at the smiling, supple
Dana Lje a moment more, however, he was almost content.
"There's one more thing," he said. "I don't want to be
insufferably skeptical about thisbut I want to see it work.
Thor, can we set up a sampling and smearing device such as
Dana describes and run a test?"
"In fifteen minutes," Dr. Wald said. "We have most of
the unit in already assembled form on our big ultrawave
receiver, and it shouldn't take any effort to add a high-
speed tape unit to it. I'll do it right now."
He went out. Weinbaum and Dana looked at each other for
a moment, rather like strange cats. Then the security officer
got up, with what he knew to be an air of somewhat grim
determination, and seized his fiancee's hands, anticipating a
struggle.
That first kiss was, by intention at least, mostly pro
forma. But by the time Wald padded back into the office,
the letter had been pretty thoroughly superseded by the spirit.
The scientist harrumphed and set his burden on the desk.
"This is all there is to it," he said, "but I had to hunt all
through the library to find a Dirac record with a beep still
on it. Just a moment more while I make connections. . . ."
Weinbaum used the time to bring his mind back to the
matter at hand, although not quite completely. Then two
tape spindles began to whir like so many bees, and the end-
stopped sound of the Dirac beep filled the room. Wald
stopped the apparatus, reset it, and started the smearing
tape very slowly in the opposite direction.
A distant babble of voices came from the speaker. As
Weinbaum leaned forward tensely, one voice said clearly
and loudly above the rest:
"Hello, Earth bureau. Lt. T. L. Matthews at Hercules
Station NGC 6341, transmission date 13-22-2091. We have
the last point on the orbit curve of your dope-runners plotted,
and the curve itself points to a small system about twenty-
five light-years from the base here; the place hasn't even got
a name on our charts. Scouts show the home planet at least
twice as heavily fortified as we anticipated, so we'll need
another cruiser. We have a 'can-do' from you in the beep
for us, but we're waiting as ordered to get it in the present
NGC 6341 Matthews out."
After the first instant of stunned amazementfor no
amount of intellectual willingness to accept could have
prepared him for the overwhelming fact itselfWeinbaum
had grabbed a pencil and begun to write at top speed. As the
voice signed out he threw the pencil down and looked ex-
citedly at Dr. Wald.
"Seven months ahead," he said, aware that he was grinning
like an idiot. "Thor, you know the trouble we've had with
that needle in the Hercules haystack! This orbit-curve trick
must be something Matthews has yet to dream upat least
he hasn't come to me with it yet, and there's nothing in the
situation as it stands now that would indicate a closing time
of six months for the case. The computers said it would take
three more years."
"It's new data," Dr. Wald agreed solemnly.
"Well, don't stop there, in God's name! Let's hear some
morel"
Dr. Wald went through the ritual, much faster this time.
"The speaker said:
"Nausentampen. Eddettompic. Berobsilom. Airnkaksetchoc.
Sanbetogmow. Datdectamset. Domatrosmin. Out."
"My word," Wald said. "What's all that?"
"That's what I was talking about," Dana Lje said. "At
least half of what you get from the beep is just as incom-
prehensible. I suppose it's whatever has happened to the
English language, thousands of years from now."
"No, it isn't," Weinbaum said. He had resumed writing,
and was still at it, despite the comparative briefness of the
transmission. "Not this sample, anyhow. That, ladies and
gentlemen,  is  codeno language consists exclusively of
four-syllable words, of that you can be sure. What's more,
' it's a version of our code. I can't break it down very far
it takes a full-time expert to read this stuffbut I get the
date and some of the sense. It's March 12, 3022, and
there's some kind of a mass evacuation taking place. The
message seems to be a routing order."
"But why will we be using code?" Dr. Wald wanted to
know. "It implies that we think somebody might overhear
ussomebody else with a Dirac. That could be very messy."
"It could indeed," Weinbaum said. "But we'll find out, I
imagine. Give her another spin, Thor."
"Shall I try for a picture this time?"
Weinbaum nodded. A moment later, he was looking
squarely into the  green-skinned  face  of  something  that
looked like an animated traffic signal with a helmet on it.
Though the creature had no mouth, the Dirac speaker was
saying quite clearly, "Hello, Chief. This is Thammos NGC
2287, transmission date Gor 60, 302 by my calendar, July
2, 2973 by yours. This is a lousy little planet. Everything
stinks of oxygen, just like Earth. But the natives accept us
and that's the important thing. We've got your genius safely
born. Detailed report coming later by paw. NGC 2287
Thammos out."
"I wish I knew my New General Catalogue better," Wein-
baum said. "Isn't that M 41 in Canis Major, the one with
the red star in the middle? And we'll be using non-humanoids
there! What was that creature, anyhow? Never mind, spin
her again."
Dr. Wald spun her again. Weinbaum, already feeling a
little  dizzy,  had  given  up  taking  notes.  That  could  come
later, all that could come later. Now he wanted only scenes
and voices, more and more scenes and voices from the
future. They were better than aquavit, even with a beer
chaser.
4
THE INDOCTRINATION tape ended, and Krasna touched a
button. The Dirac screen darkened, and folded silently back
into the desk.
"They didn't see their way through to us, not by a long
shot," he said. "They didn't see, for instance, that when
one section of the government becomes nearly all-knowing
no matter how small it was to begin withit necessarily
becomes all of the government that there is. Thus the
bureau turned into the Service and pushed everyone else out.
"On the other hand, those people did come to be afraid
that a government with an all-knowing arm might become
a rigid dictatorship. That couldn't happen and didn't happen,
because the more you know, the wider your field of possible
operation becomes  and the  more fluid and dynamic a
society you need.  How could a rigid society expand to
other star systems, let alone other galaxies? It couldn't be
done."
"I should think it could," Jo said slowly. "After all, if
you know in advance what everybody is going to do . . ."
"But we don't, Jo. That's just a popular fictionor, if
you like, a red herring. Not all of the business of the cosmos
is carried on over the Dirac, after all. The only events we
can ever overhear are those which are transmitted as a
message. Do you order your lunch over the Dirac? Of course
you don't. Up to now, you've never said a word over the
Dirac in your life.
"And there's much more to it than that. All dictatorships
are based on the proposition that government can somehow
control a man's thoughts. We know now that the conscious-
ness of the observer is the only free thing in the Universe.
Wouldn't we look foolish trying to control that, when our
entire physics shows that it's impossible to do so? That's
why the Service is in no sense a thought police. We're inter-
ested only in acts. We're an Event Police."
"But why?" Jo said. "If all history is fixed, why do we
bother with these boy-meets-girl assignments, for instance?
The meetings will happen anyhow."
"Of course they will," Krasna agreed immediately. "But
look, Jo. Our interests as a government depend upon the
future. We operate as if the future is as real as the past,
and so far we haven't been disappointed: the Service is
100 per cent successful. But that very success isn't without
its warnings.  What would happen if we stopped supervising
events? We don't know, and we don't dare take the chance.
Despite the evidence that the future is fixed, we have to
take on the role of the caretaker of inevitability. We believe
that nothing can possibly go wrong . . . but we have to act
on the philosophy that history helps only those who help
themselves.
"That's why we safeguard huge numbers of courtships
right through to contract, and even beyond it. We have to
see to it that every single person who is mentioned in any
Dirac 'cast gets born. Our obligation as Event Police is to
make the events of the future possible, because those events
are crucial to our societyeven the smallest of them. It's an
enormous task, believe me, and it gets bigger and bigger
every day. Apparently it always will."
"Always?" Jo said. "What about the public? Isn't it
going to smell this out sooner or later? The evidence is
piling up at a terrific rate."
"Yes and no," Krasna said. "Lots of people are smelling
it out right now,  just  as  you  did.  But  the  number of new
people we need in the Service grows fasterit's always
ahead of the number of laymen who follow the clues to the
truth."
Jo took a deep breath. "You take all this as if it were
as commonplace as boiling an egg, Kras," he said. "Don't
you ever wonder about some of the things you get from the
beep? That 'cast Dana Lje picked up from Canes Venatici,
for instance, the one from the ship that was traveling back-
ward in time? How is that possible? What could be the
purpose? Is it"
"Pace, pace," Krasna said. "I don't know and I don't
care. Neither should you. That event is too far in the future
for us to worry about. We can't possibly know its context
yet,  so there's no sense  in trying  to understand it.  If an
Englishman of around 1600 had found out about the Amer-
ican Revolution, he would have thought it a tragedy; an
Englishman of 1950 would have a very different view of it.
We're in the same spot. The messages we get from the really
far future have no contexts as yet."
"I think I see," Jo said. "I'll get used to it in time, I
suppose, after I use the Dirac for a while. Or does my new
rank authorize me to do that?"
"Yes, it does. But, Jo, first I want to pass on to you a
rule of Service etiquette that must never be broken. You won't
be allowed anywhere near a Dirac mike until you have it
burned into your memory beyond any forgetfulness."
"I'm listening, Kras, believe me."
"Good. This is the rule: The date of a Serviceman's death
must never be mentioned in a Dirac 'cast."
Jo biinked, feeling a little chilly. The reason behind the
rule was decidedly tough-minded, but its ultimate kindness
was plain. He said, "I won't forget that. I'll want that pro-
tection myself. Many thanks, Kras. What's my new assign-
ment?"
"To begin with," Krasna said, grinning, "as simple a job
as I've ever given you, right here on Randolph. Skin out of
here and find me that cab driverthe one who mentioned
time-travel to you. He's uncomfortably close to the truth;
closer than you were in one category.
"Find him, and bring him to me. The Service is about
to take in a new raw recruiti"