“Sir, I am assured the tree will survive,” said Basil. “I cannot have that on my conscience, along with so many other items.”
Basil’s right arm was encased in plaster of Paris; it had been broken by his fall from the tree. His torso, under his shirt, was encased in strong elastic tape, several miles of it, in fact, to help his four broken ribs mend. The swelling on his face, from the blow delivered by the late SS Hauptsturmführer Boch, had gone down somewhat, but it was still yellowish, corpulent, and quite repulsive, as was the blue-purple wreath that surrounded his bloodshot eye. He needed a cane to walk, and of all his nicks, it was the abraded knee that turned out to hurt the most, other than the headache, constant and throbbing, from the concussion. In the manly British officer way, however, he still managed to wear his uniform, even if his jacket was thrown about his shoulders over his shirt and tie.
“It looks like you had a jolly trip,” said the admiral.
“It had its ups and downs, sir,” said Basil.
“I think we know why we are here,” said General Cavendish, ever irony-free, “and I would like to see us get on with it.”
It was the same as it always was: the darkish War Room under the Treasury, the prime minister’s lair. That great man’s cigar odor filled the air, and too bad if you couldn’t abide it. A few posters, a few maps, a few cheery exhortations to duty, and that was it. There were still four men across from Basil, a general, an admiral, Gubbins, and the man of tweed, Professor Turing.
“Professor,” said Sir Colin, “as you’re just in from the country and new to the information, I think it best for you to acquire the particulars of Captain St. Florian’s adventures from his report. But you know his results. He succeeded, though he got quite a thrashing in the process. I understand it was a close-run thing. Now you have had the results of his mission on hand at Bletchley for over a week, and it is time to see whether or not St. Florian’s blood, sweat, and tears were worth it.”
“Of course,” said Turing. He opened his briefcase, took out the seven Minox photos of the pages from The Path to Jesus, reached in again, and pulled out around three hundred pages of paper, whose leaves he flipped to show the barons of war. Every page was filled with either numerical computation, handwriting on charts, or lengthy analysis in typescript.
“We have not been lazy,” he said. “Gentleman, we have tested everything. Using our decryptions from the Soviet diplomatic code as our index, we have reduced the words and letters to numerical values and run them through every electronic bombe we have. We have given them to our best intuitive code breakers — it seems to be a gift, a certain kind of mind that can solve these problems quickly, without much apparent effort. We have analyzed them up, down, sideways, and backwards. We have tested the message against every classical code known to man. We have compared it over and over, word by word, with the printed words of the Reverend MacBurney. We have measured it to the thousandth of an inch, even tried to project it as a geometric problem. Two PhDs from Oxford even tried to find a pattern in the seemingly random arrangement of the odd crosslike formations doodled across all the pages. Their conclusion was that the seemingly random pattern was actually random.”
He went silent.
“Yes?” said Sir Colin.
“There is no secret code within it,” the professor finally said. “As any possible key to a book code, it solves nothing. It unlocks nothing. There is no secret code at all within it.”
The moment was ghastly.
Finally Basil spoke.
“Sir, it’s not what I went through to obtain those pages that matters. I’ve had worse drubbings in football matches. But a brave and decent man has put himself at great risk to get them to you. His identity would surprise you, but it seems there are some of them left on the other side. Thus I find it devastating to write the whole thing off and resign him to his fate for nothing. It weighs heavily.”
“I understand,” said Professor Turing. “But you must understand as well. Book codes work with books, don’t they? Because the book is a closed, locked universe — that is the point, after all. What makes the book code work, as simple a device as it is, is, after all, that it’s a book. It’s mass-produced on Linotype machines, carefully knitted up in a bindery, festooned with some amusing imagery for a cover, and whether you read it in Manchester or Paris or Berlin or Kathmandu, the same words will be found on the same places on the same page, and thus everything makes sense. This, however, is not a book but a manuscript, in a human hand. Who knows how age, drinking, debauchery, tricks of memory, lack of stamina, advanced syphilis or gonorrhea may have corrupted the author’s effort? It will almost certainly get messier and messier as it goes along, and it may in the end not resemble the original at all. Our whole assumption was that it would be a close enough replica to what MacBurney had produced twenty years earlier for us to locate the right letters and unlock the code. Everything about it is facsimile, after all, even to those frequent religious doodles on the pages. If it were a good facsimile, the growth or shrinkage would be consistent and we could alter our calculations by measurable quantities and unlock it. But it was not to be. Look at the pages, please, Captain. You will see that even among themselves, they vary greatly. Sometimes the letters are large, sometimes small. Sometimes a page contains twelve hundred letters, sometimes six hundred, sometimes twentythree hundred. In certain of them, it seems clear that he was drunk, pen in hand, and the lines are all atumble, and he is just barely in control. His damnable lack of consistency dooms any effort to use this as a key to a code contained in the original. I told you it was a long shot.”
Again a long and ghastly silence.
“Well, then, Professor,” said Gubbins, “that being the case, I think we’ve taken you from your work at Bletchley long enough. And we have been absent from our duties as well. Captain St. Florian needs rest and rehabilitation. Basil, I think all present will enthusiastically endorse you for decoration, if it matters, for an astonishing and insanely courageous effort. Perhaps a nice promotion, Basil. Would you like to be a major? Think of the trouble you could cause. But please don’t be bitter. To win a war you throw out a million seeds and hope that some of them produce, in the end, fruit. I’ll alert the staff to call—”
“Excuse me,” said Professor Turing. “What exactly is going on here?”
“Ah, Professor, there seems to be no reason for us to continue.”
“I daresay you chaps have got to learn to listen,” he said.
Basil was slightly shocked by the sudden tartness in his voice.
“I am not like Captain St. Florian, a witty ironist, and I am not like you three high mandarins with your protocols and all that elaborate and counterfeit bowing and scraping. I am a scientist. I speak in exact truth. What I say is true and nothing else is.”
“I’m rather afraid I don’t grasp your meaning, sir,” said Gubbins stiffly. It was clear that neither he nor the other two mandarins enjoyed being addressed so dismissively by a forty-year-old professor in baggy tweeds and wire-frame glasses.
“I said listen. Listen!” repeated the professor, rather rudely, but with such intensity it became instantly clear that he regarded them as intellectual inferiors and was highly frustrated by their rash conclusion.
“Sir,” said General Cavendish, rather icily, “if you have more to add, please add it. As General Sir Colin has said, we have other duties—”
“Secret code!” interrupted the professor.
All were stupefied.