I motioned Bugs to come over and held the receiver so we could both hear. “Ameche, you know who this is?”
“Yeah. I recognize your voice, Mr. Goldberg.”
“Good. Now, listen. You cooperate with Mr. Victor, and the contract’s canceled. You understand? The slate’s clean. But you have to do whatever he requests. Otherwise, it’s a sure hit.”
“I got it, Mr. Goldberg. I’ll play along. And, listen, I’m really sorry about that business with the M.F.-ers. I couldn’t help—”
“It will be forgotten, Ameche. Just do what Mr. Victor wants.” The receiver clicked and went dead.
Bugs Ameche turned to me with a new respect. The ravaged no-man’s-land of his countenance was flushed with appreciation. His willingness to cooperate shone from his beady eyes.
I got right to it. “Has Tom Swift contacted you yet?” I asked him.
“Not yet. But he’s gotten word to me through some phreaks we both know that he’ll call me tonight -- about an hour from now.”
“Do you know why he’s calling you?”
Bugs poked at a pimple under his right ear. “He’s probably going to pull off some really big phone trip, and I’m the only one technically hip enough to dig it. Tom has a pretty big ego, and I’m the only real competition he’s ever had when it comes to phreaking. I guess he wants the kick of lording it over me. Like he has this thing about how being blind makes him superior to phreaks like me who can see.”
“What’s being blind have to do with it?”
“More than half the phone phreaks in the country are blind,” Bugs explained. “Blind kids dig sonics. Lots of them make up for not seeing by getting into sound. A few years back, one of the original blind phone phreaks, a kid, went to a summer camp for the blind. Lots of the kids there were into electronic sound. He introduced them to phone phreaking. It really caught on, and when the kids went home, they passed along the phreaking techniques to other blind kids they went to school with, or knew through various institutes for the blind. That’s how come the majority of phone phreaks in the U.S. today are blind.”
“And Tom Swift thinks that makes them superior?”
“Yeah. He has this crazy theory that blind people generally are superior to people who can see. Also, he thinks phreaks are the elite of the blind -- the natural leadership of the sightless is how Tom puts it. Not being blind, naturally I couldn’t buy that. It was one of the big reasons why we split. And when we did, all of the phreaks who went with Tom were blind.”
“Do you know what he’s been up to since you split?”
“Not really. Tom’s a wild man. Could be anything.” Bugs thought a moment. “Of course, he was getting into computers,” he remembered.
“Did he ever mention a specific computer?”
“Well, there was this gag he pulled with the FBI ‘brain.’ ”
“I know about that. Anything else? Anything even bigger?”
“He hinted about something really big with a computer, something world-shaking. But he was cagey about the specifics.”
“When he calls tonight,” I wondered, “is there any way of tracing the call?”
“Not any conventional way. The cops couldn’t do it. I doubt that even Bell would have the know-how. Not the way Tom stacks tandems!” Bugs mulled it over. “I just might be able to take a crack at it myself,” he decided finally. “Come on along with me.”
The old lady picked up her knitting, and we followed him to the basement of the bordello. Here Bugs unlocked a door, ushered us into a room filled with all sorts of complicated-looking electronics equipment, and locked it behind us. He cleared a bench for us to sit on, then set about performing certain tasks. Bugs explained what he was doing as he worked.
“I’m hooking up this phone to a speaker so that when Tom calls you can hear what he says. . . . Incidentally, Tom has extremely sensitive hearing, so be very quiet. . . . Now, this is a high-sensitivity recording device. I’m plugging into the receiver. It will record all the background noises on the wire and transmit them to this gadget here, which is really a very complicated piece of equipment I developed myself.”
“What does it do?” I asked.
“If it works, it will mute out the sound of Tom’s voice, produce a tape of just the electronic background noises, and then separate out the various sounds so that we’ll have five or six or eight separate tapes in sequence. You dig? On each tape will be the noise of one relay switch connecting a tandem to a long-line. Then it’s a matter of identifying each of the sounds. If he doesn’t get too fancy, I should be able to figure out where he’s calling from within maybe an hour after the call.”
I took it on faith. The technology was beyond me. I watched Bugs finish setting up his equipment, and then we settled back to wait for the phone to ring. And ring it did—-right on schedule.
Bugs answered. “Hello.”
“Hello, Bugs.” Tom Swift’s voice came over the speaker loud and clear. “I’m just calling to blow your mind, old buddy. You know what’s going to happen when I hang up? Operation Silence, that’s what!”
What the hell was “Operation Silence”?
“You worked it out, Tom?” Bugs inquired. “You’re sure?”
“You know me, Bugs. I wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t sure. It’s set. And all blind phreaks, Bugs—the elite! Five mice plus me. That’s all it takes. And Operation Silence is just phase one. After that comes phase two and phase three. It’s going to be a new world for phone phreaks, baby. You could have been in on it, but you missed the boat.”
“I guess I did, Tom.”
“In a way, I’m glad you did, Bugs. It’s purer this way. It takes the blind to really see the way. Your eyes might have led us astray.”
The old lady’s knitting needles clicked loudly in the short silence which followed this.
“Tom, you’re flipping out,” Bugs said finally.
“No such thing. Just wait. You’ll see. Blind is beautifull”
“Phase two is computers,” Bugs guessed. “But what’s phase three, Tom?”
“Today Germany!” Tom Swift chuckled. “Abyssinia, old buddy.” There was a series of clicks. He’d hung up.
And tomorrow the world! I completed the quote to myself. That was phase three!
But I still didn’t understand what phase one— Operation Silence—was. Bugs was working furiously over his equipment, pulling the tapes and setting them up on reels he’d prepared in advance. I waited until he was ready to play them back, and then I raised the question.
“Operation Silence.” Bugs repeated the words after me. “Simple. Tom has blanked out the phone service all over the country.” He picked up the telephone and listened a minute. Then he jiggled the receiver and dialed. Finally he hung it back up. “He’s done it, all right,” he told us. “As of right now, it’s as if Alexander Graham Bell had never existed. There is no telephone service!”
What we have here, I thought to myself in a daze, is a failure to communicate!
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A monumental failure to communicate! Like Pearl Harbor, VJ Day21 , and the moon landing, it was to become one of those times by which people reckon for years afterward. Where were you when JFK was shot? Where were you when the lights went out all over the Eastern Seaboard? And now, where were you when the phones went dead?
Miss Matilda Crotchet, a spinster lady of Kokomo, Indiana, was sitting at home waiting to receive her regular nightly anonymous obscene phone call. The phone never rang. Miss Crotchet’s faith in the indiscriminate lust of men was destroyed. The next day she bought a vibrator.
Snappy Wheeler, a traveling salesman eking out a living in the Wisconsin boondocks, tried to call his wife to tell her he’d be home a day early from his latest selling trip. When he couldn’t reach her, he went home anyway. He walked in on his district manager in bed with his spouse. Snappy Wheeler was subsequently reassigned to the prime Milwaukee territory, and his income has doubled.