THE dreamy-looking Hoyle pulled his long hair, and said: "Repeat a thing often enough, and it leaves an indelible impression on a man's mind, whether he wants to believe it or not. If either of you gentlemen are married you'll know what I mean."
"Hmp, hmp. I am; Hasbrook isn't that I know of. I get you, though, Doc. It sort of wears a path through the mind, doesn't it?"
Hoyle was silent for so long that Dahlgren thought he hadn't heard, and started to repeat. But the psychologist, still looking at nothing, raised his hand."Wears a path, yes. I suppose one could describe it thus in popular terms. I think you've said something, Admiral. If you have, we may yet hoist the Alliance with their own petard."
"Hmp! What the Hell's a petard?"
"Tsk, and you a military man! It's a kind of bomb used in the later middle ages for siege work, and 'hoist' in that sense means 'blow up'." With which Hoyle retired into his own rarefied mental atmosphere, refusing to elaborate.
It was a month before the Admiral came around again; the Alliance was giving our Naval Intelligence plenty of overtime work. You wouldn't have guessed it from the censored newspapers, but I knew that the morale of the countries of the Confederacy was going from bad to worse. In the United States there was sabotage—not by spies, but by disgruntled Americans in Milwaukee, an attempted peace-at-any-price demonstration in Topeka, and a lynching of an Army officer in Georgia. In other countries it was worse: Argentina was practically out of the war, and Australia was cracking.
I didn't wonder. Wherever you turned, Raiberti's propaganda got in your hair. If the ceaseless rain of half-truths, insinuations, and lies got on my nerves, I could imagine how it affected the masses of people, who lacked my inside knowledge. The usual spy-fever was bad enough, but this was something undreamed of in the old days.
The neatest trick that Raiberti's agents pulled was the doctoring of a load of newsprint on its way to the presses of my paper, so that three hours after the papers were printed the original print faded out and Raiberti's messages took its place—just about the time the buyers of the papers were reading them. Almost as good was their placing a miniature phonograph in the microphone that McRae was supposed to use for a broadcast speech. When the President started, we heard what was apparently his voice, complete with Philadelphia accent, go off on a rambling tirade denouncing Congress, the Army, the Navy, the farmers, the workers, and everybody else in sight, the talk being punctuated by frequent hiccups. And all the time poor McRae was making one of the best and most reasonable speeches of his career! It was hardly surprising that the rumors that Raiberti had started concerning the President's sanity revived.
WHEN Dahlgren did come around again he brought a gang. There was, the poetic-looking Hoyle, and a dark man who combined the outlines and manner of an Iowa realtor with a buttery Oxford accent; he was introduced as Colonel Bosh of the Indian Army. The last man, whose name the Admiral said was Mr. Tsung, was an obvious Eastern Asiatic. When I got a good look at him something went "click;" I almost said "Phil!" but stopped at the "ph."
"Tsung" simultaneously recognized me and almost spoke, but checked himself. Then he laughed."We might as well own up, Walt. The Admiral knows who I am, but he didn't know that you did."
Years before, I had gone to high-school in California with a Japanese-American boy named Philip Okuma. He had—an incredible thing unless you knew him—been elected student-body president. But some local patriotic society became exercised and forced a change in our so-called Constitution, so that poor Phil was euchered out of his job. The experience hadn't soured him.
Now he mentioned that he was doing Intelligence work."What else is there?" he asked."My people have been in this country for three generations, but a lot of good that does me, when every Jap is supposed to be a spy, a saboteur, an emperor-worshiper, and a lot of other things. And in Japan I'd be considered a foreigner who had been exposed to the wicked and impious ideas of the Western barbarians." He laughed again.
The Admiral called the meeting to order. Hoyle handed him a little black cylinder, about the size of the eraser in the end of an ordinary pencil.
"Colonel Bosh," Dahlgren said, "Your job is this: your agents are to introduce these—these things into the electrical communications of the enemy in Burma, without getting caught. You have, I know, pulled riskier jobs before. I'm having the technical details typed and photo-offset; you'll get them tomorrow. Tsung here —Okuma, that is—is to get the first ones installed in Japan. I'm sorry we had to deprive you of a good molar, Okuma, but I think you'll find that the fake one we gave you to hold the— hmp—capsule works well. The capsule, once installed, cannot be removed without setting off a minute charge of thermite in it that will destroy it. I can't tell you how it works, not even you, Hasbrook, but you can take my word that it does. When it and, we hope, several thousand more like it have been given a chance to work, your general staff will be given the necessary information."
Bosh, who was, I knew, a much more dangerous man than one would have suspected from his aggressively harmless exterior, made a fatuous little speech about doing one's duty for one's paw people, Sir. We talked of this and that, and they went.
IN about a month, my sources began to turn up incredible reports. A Japanese cruiser squadron was caught and wiped out off the Kuriles by a superior Russo-American force. Their commander, fished out of the water and forcibly prevented from committing suicide, babbled that his rear admiral, had said to go ahead because the whole battle-fleet was right behind him, when we knew that there were no Japanese battleships within hundreds of miles.
In Lithuania, General Czarnewicz was court-martialed and shot by the Alliance high command for saying that all was quiet on his front, when actually the Russians had broken his line, and he was just about to jump in his car and flee to avoid being run over by his own retreating troops.
Dictators von Freygang and Botorovic weren't on speaking terms, each swearing that the other had baldly lied to him at their last meeting.
In Bengal, Field Marshall Sato started an offensive with one day's ammunition, after assuring his Supply Service that he had enough for a month. When his Chinese troops ran out of shells and cartridges and the Indians counter-attacked, the results were pitiful. The Indians almost got across Burma into Siam before they were effectively opposed, and their advance was stopped more by the clogging of their supply lines with hundreds of thousands of prisoners than by the frantic efforts of the Alliance armies. I suspected that somehow our buttery friend Bosh was at the bottom of the debacle.
Then one afternoon the Admiral paid me another visit, his last one during the war."That damn place is noisier than a triple eighteen-inch turret," he said, referring to his office."Every three minutes somebody pops in with a 'Sir, what do I do with this now? ' or a 'Sir, Commander Zilch sends his compliments and wants to know something, ' and so on. I've got to get these reports read, so I came up here. Listen, Hasbrook, will you call up on that secret 'phone of yours and arrange to have any important intelligence 'phoned up? Big news is likely to break any minute."
He settled down to his reports. Presently the bell rang, and in walked Philip Okuma. To the Admiral's and my questions as to what in Hell he was doing here, he replied that he'd just been flown over from Siberia, and hadn't found Dahlgren in his office when he went there to report.
"For a while," he said, "I had no trouble installing the capsules, as I had been given the rank of corporal in the Imperial Army and was assigned to headquarters as a stenographer. But as a result of the operation of the capsules there'd been some bad losses on the Manchurian front, and the first thing I knew I was shipped off to the trenches, leaving my subordinates in Intelligence to carry on the good work with the capsules.