"Is that where you got to! You should not have gone without me and I shall never forgive you."
"I couldn't take you," Jason said. "I wouldn't have gone myself if you had insisted. You are worth more than a billion credits to me."
"That's the nicest thing you ever said to me." She smiled now and blew him a kiss. Kerk grunted and looked on with great disinterest.
"When you are through, would you tell us what happened?" he said. "Did the computer hit the right number?"
"Not at all. I did it." She smiled into the shocked silence. "I told you how interested I am now in codes and ciphers. Simply thrilling, with many military applications, too, of course. Shrenkly told me about substitution ciphers and I tried one, the most simple. Where the letter A is one, B is two and so forth. Next I put a word into this cipher but it came out 81122021, which was two numbers short. Then Shrenkly told me that there must be two digits for each letter or there would be transcription problems, like you have to use 01 for A instead of just the number. So I added a zero to the two one-digit numbers, and that made ten digits. Then I fed the number into the computer and it was sent and that was that."
"The jackpot with your first number — with your first try?" Jason asked hollowly. "Wasn't that pretty lucky?"
"Not really. You know military people don't have much imagination. You must have told me that a thousand times at least. So I took the simplest possible, looked it up in the Esperanto dictionary. "
"Haltu?"
"That's right. I encoded it and sent it. And that was that."
"And just what does that word mean?" Kerk asked.
"Stop," Jason said, "just plain stop."
"I would have done the same thing myself," Kerk said, nodding in agreement. "Let us collect the money and go home."
COMMANDO RAID
Private Truscoe and the captain had left the truck, parked out of sight in the jungle, then had walked a good hundred yards farther down the road. They were crouched now in the dense shadows of the trees, with the silver light of the full moon picking out every rut and hollow of the dirt track before them.
"Be quiet!" the captain whispered, putting a restraining hand on the soldier's arm, listening. Truscoe held his breath and struggled to keep absolutely still. Captain Carter was a legendary jungle fighter, with the scars and medals to prove it. If he thought there was something dangerous, creeping closer in the darkness. Truscoe suppressed an involuntary shudder.
"It's all right," the captain said, this time in a normal speaking tone. "Something big out there, buffalo or deer. But it's downwind and it took off as soon as it caught our smell. You can smoke if you want to."
The soldier hesitated, not sure how to answer. Finally, he said, "Sir, aren't we supposed… I mean someone could see the flame?"
"We're not hiding, Private Truscoe. William — do they call you Billy?"
"Why, yes sir."
"We picked this spot, Billy, because none of the locals normally come this way at night. Light up. The smoke will let all the wildlife know that we're here and they'll keep their distance. They are a lot more afraid of us than you are of them. Not only that, but our informant can find us by the smell too. One whiff and he'll know that it's not the local leaf. That trail over here leads to the village and he'll probably come that way."
Billy looked but could see neither trail nor opening in the jungle wall where the officer pointed. But if the captain said so, it had to be true. He clutched his M16 rifle tightly and looked around at the buzzing, clattering darkness.
"It's not so much the critters out there, sir. I've done plenty of hunting in Alabama and I know this gun can stop anything around. Except maybe another gun. I mean, this geek, sir, the one that's coming. Isn't he kind of a traitor? You know, if he finks on his own people how can we know he won't do the same to us?"
Carter's voice was patient and gave no indication how much he loathed the word geek.
"The man's an informant, not a traitor, and he is more eager than we are for this deal to go through. He was originally a refugee from a village in the south, one that was wiped out by that earthquake some years back. You have to understand that these people are very provincial and he'll be a 'foreigner' in this village — as long as he lives. His wife is dead, he has nothing to stay here for. When we approached him for information he jumped at the chance. We'll pay him enough so that he won't ever have to work again. He'll retire to a village close to the one where he was raised. It's a good deal."
Billy was emboldened by the darkness and the presence of the solitary officer. "Still, seems sort of raw for the people he lived with. Selling them out."
"No one is being sold out." The captain was much more positive now. "What we are doing for them is for their own good. They may not see it that way now, but it is. It is the long-term results that count."
The captain sounded a little peeved. Billy shifted uneasily and did not answer. He should have remembered you don't talk to officers like they were real people or something.
"Stand up, here he comes," Carter said.
Billy had the feeling that maybe the captain could have outhunted him even in his own stand of woods back in Alabama. He neither saw nor heard a thing. Only when the short, turbaned figure appeared at their sides did he know that the informant had arrived.
"Tuan?" the man whispered, and Carter spoke to him quietly in his own tongue. It was so much geek talk to Billy: they had had lectures on the language, but he had never bothered to listen. When they stepped out into the flood of moonlight he saw that the man was a typical geek, too. Scrawny and little and old. There was more cloth in the turban than in his loincloth. All of his possessions, the accumulation of a lifetime, were rolled in a straw mat that he carried in one hand. He sounded very frightened.
"Let's get back to the truck," Captain Carter ordered. "He won't talk here. Too afraid the villagers will find him."
He's got cause to worry, Billy thought, following the disproportionate pair back down the road. The captain was half bent over as he talked to the little man.
Once the truck had coughed to life and the driver was tooling her back to camp, the informant relaxed. He talked steadily in a high, birdlike voice, and the captain put a sheet of paper on his map case and sketched in the details of the village and the surrounding area. Billy nodded, bored, with his rifle between his legs, looking forward to some chow and hitting the sack. There was an all-night cook in the MP mess who would fry up steak and eggs for you if you were on late duty. The voice twittered on and the map grew.
"Don't want to drop government property, do you, Billy?" Carter asked, and Billy realized that he had dozed off and the M16 had fallen from his fingers. But the captain had caught it and held it safe for him. The sharp blue illumination of the mercury vapor lights of the camp poured into the open back of the truck. Billy opened his mouth, but did not know what to say. Then the officer was gone, with the tiny native scrambling after him, and Billy was alone. He jumped down, boots squelching in the mud, and stretched. Even though the captain had saved his neck rather than report him, he still wasn't sure whether he liked him or not.
Less than three hours after he had fallen asleep the light came on above him in the tent, and the recorded notes of reveille sawed out of the speaker mounted next to it. Billy blinked at his watch and saw that it was just after two.
"What the hell is all this about?" someone shouted "Another damn night maneuver?"
Billy knew, but before he could open his mouth the CO came on the speaker and told them first.
"We're going in, men. This is it. The first units jump off in two hours' time. H Hour will be at first light, at exactly 0515. Your unit commanders will give you complete and detailed instructions before we roll. Full field packs. This is what you have been training for — and this is the moment that you have been waiting for. Don't get rattled, do your job, and don't believe all the latrine rumors that you hear. I'm talking particularly to you new men. I know you have been chewed out a lot, and you have been called 'combat virgins' and a lot worse. Forget it. You're a team now — and after tomorrow you won't even be virgins."