Ganelon found himself in darkness within the grove of rosy-trunked trees. He was alone. The pair of pale-blue lights that led him there had vanished. He knew now they were the eyes of Fong’s Siamese cat Jasmeen, to whom his arch enemy had fed this bitter dream in the Egyptian style. Now the time had come to look down into the fire which cracked at his feet. Yes, there it was. The wood burned as red as raw beef. Something dark and trimmed with silver lay smoldering across the flames. The Black Emperor.
How Fong’s laughter rang in the darkness!
When dawn came, Ganelon stuffed his feet into the waiting carpet slippers and wearily made his way downstairs, where he took a ledger bound in green buckram from the secret drawer in his desk. To the list of Dr. Ludwig Fong’s English minions, Ganelon added a new name — Professor Moriarty.
Straight lines
by Isaac Asimov[10]
I stretched out luxuriously in my armchair in the library of the Union Club and said, “When I was young, I had a memory like blotting paper. Without actually trying to, I memorized all the maps in my geography books and to this day I retain them in detail. I know all the boundaries, all the capitals, rivers, mountain ranges, and so on, but they’re all pre-World War II. I can’t do Africa and parts of Asia for that reason.”
Baranov said, “If that’s your only problem in life, you’re not suffering much.”
I ignored that. “I used to win bets that I could write down the names of all forty-eight states — forty-eight then — in five minutes, or that I could write down every state capital with its state in ten.”
“Can you still do it?” said Jennings, sounding only faintly interested.
“Of course,” I said, “and I can add Juneau, Alaska, and Honolulu, Hawaii.” A bit more cautiously, I added, “I haven’t tried it in thirty years or so. I suppose it’s conceivable I might miss one or two.” Then, my courage reviving: “But I doubt it.”
“Did you make much money that way?” asked Jennings.
“I never bet more than a nickel,” I said virtuously, “and I was betting on a sure thing.”
“You must have been an insufferable prig when you were young,” said Jennings.
“Why not?” said Baranov. “He’s insufferable now.”
It was at this point that Griswold stirred. He grunted, sipped at his drink, and said, “I think I can match that performance, at least as far as the United States is concerned, and even outdo it.”
I said, “Come, come, Griswold, if you think you’re going to trap me into one of your bets—”
“Not at all,” said Griswold freezingly, “I was merely going to say that an interesting espionage puzzle once rested on just such a point, and I see now that I will be forced to explain.”
The matter [said Griswold] came up during the Second World War, when I was a young man on the fringes of the world of spy and counterspy. I was under the wing of one of the grand old hands of that world — Wingate, his name was. He’s long since dead, though he died in bed and in comfort, which was not true of many of us.
He told me the story one evening when we were taking a break from our efforts to work out just what the Germans knew, if anything, about our forthcoming landing at Salerno. It was a relief to turn to the simpler days before our entry into the First World War.
In 1916, as it is just possible one or another of you might know, the United States was having trouble with a Mexican revolutionary — well, we called him a bandit — named Pancho Villa. He gambled for popular support in Mexico against his Mexican opponents by trying to force the United States to intervene on the side of those opponents.
He did this by killing Americans. In January of that year, he stopped a train in northern Mexico, took off seventeen American engineers, and shot sixteen of them without even bothering to make up a reason. When that didn’t do the trick he actually sent four hundred raiders across the American line into the border town of Columbus, New Mexico. They burned the town and killed nineteen Americans.
That got him what he wanted. The United States could under no conditions sit still for that. We forced the Mexican government to grant permission, and a week after Villa’s raid we sent six thousand American troops under Black Jack Pershing into Mexico. They penetrated hundreds of miles into the country and kept up the case for nearly a year. The one thing they didn’t do, however, was catch Villa.
Villa, after all, was on his home turf and was swimming through a sea of sympathetic peasants. As week after week and month after month passed without a capture, the United States looked more and more like a paper tiger. Villa grew more and more popular with the Mexican people, and the Mexican government was forced to take on a more and more anti-American stance or it would lose all support. It was a fiasco for the U.S. that ended in February 1917 when a stubborn President Wilson was forced to bow to the inevitable because it was clear to him that we would soon be at war with Germany and have far more important problems on our hands. He recalled Pershing and Villa lived on until 1923 when he was assassinated by a Mexican enemy.
And yet Villa might have been caught fairly early on and things would have worked out well for the American forces because they had an ace operative on their side. He was a young man from across the border who had been an American citizen for the last decade. He was well tanned, he carefully cultivated a Mexican-style moustache, he could speak Mexican Spanish perfectly, and in the proper clothes no one could possibly doubt he was anything but Mexican.
He was a crackerjack scout. If anyone could have found Villa in the jumble of semi-desert hills and ravines in which the American division was trying to find its way, it was this man. He had joined the expedition under the name of Mackenzie Clifford, but few people knew that. To almost everyone, he was only Pedro.
He was a man of amazing skill. He managed to find peasants who for one reason or another were sufficiently anti-Villa to be willing to drop messages in places where they could be found by the proper people. He worked up a chain of helpers, and American soldiers saw him only in apparent accidental encounters during which he spoke only in Spanish and behaved like an ignorant peasant who dared not show openly the hostility he clearly felt. That was necessary. One never knew what eyes were watching, what ears were listening.
Generally he was heard from only by way of messages in cipher. They were mere substitution ciphers — those were simple days and whatever skills Villa and his men might have had, they did not include sophistication in deciphering coded messages. There was one complication, to be sure. There were twenty-six different systems of substitution, each one in itself simple. Each was tied to a letter of the alphabet and the variations for each letter had to be memorized, both by Pedro and by several men in the camp. That was better than risking the equivalent of a dictionary on a scrap of paper, which might be lost.
If you began with a key word, and used each letter of the word in turn as representing a particular variety of substitution, you might have a message consisting of, let us say, seven or eight t’s in a row that would yet be deciphered into a meaningful word. Naturally, the identity of the key word was all-important and it was periodically changed. Pedro chose them, and in the accidental meetings with him or with some of his Mexican allies there was always some reference to it that seemed innocent.
“I have a brother who lives in Mobile. Senor,” someone might say. That would seem to any unauthorized ear to be a natural attempt to curry favor with an armed and possibly dangerous foreign soldier, but it made Alabama the key word.