The Negro section chief stopped his girls there. “Just that much,” he said. “You know what Data Processing is going to say about tying up this much machine time. Wait’ll they find out what it’s for.” Suddenly a light seemed to explode over his head, and inspiration spread in an expression of shock on his face.
He pulled out a listing of the autocorrelator and replaced his girls at the remote console. With one hand he keyed in a crash Halt instruction that stopped his program while with the other hand he riffed through the listing until he found what he wanted. In thirty seconds he had keyed in half a dozen instructions and restarted the giant computer system, but not before his desk communicator had come alive.
“Dean, you clumsy feather-merchant-” bleated the radio. The head of Crypto put his hand on the send only switch and talked soothingly into it.
“Your little erector-set will be all right, Johnny. I only clobbered the processor for the time it took to enter a couple instructions.”
“Brother, you don’t demand Conversational mode from a system like this with no warning! Don’t you know enough to let the job terminate, and then make a re-run? Taking a free hand like that is going to cost everybody, you games-playing idiot.”
“Now, that’s talk unbecoming a department head,” said Dean. “I’ve got the priority from Mister Man himself, and I think even you’ll agree it was worth the interruption to keep the computer from solving crossword puzzles.”
“Solving what? To keep the computer from what?”
“I put in an autocor to-so help me-find out if the daily crossword is mixed up in a Thrush gambit. Just as the program got its teeth into the first pass at my data, I realized that any correlation worth its salt would solve the puzzles too. You can’t find out if there’s secrets in ‘em unless you know the answers. Before that tied us up for hours or maybe days, I tore into the program and told it to find the solution in the next day’s paper.”
The communicator buzzed, and clicked off with no comment. Below, the computer continued its complicated path through the data.
Five correlations were noted on the program’s first pass. One, every puzzle of any interest was signed “Avery D. Porpoise” as originator. Two, all these puzzles were cast in roughly the same format. 3, 4, and 5 were definitions common to many puzzles: A third of the puzzles asked the question “Who was Peer Gynt’s mother?” and a third each included the definitions “A Legume” and “A Celebes Ox.” The system suspended operations on the newspaper files and worked on other programs while the Crypto team prepared a magna-chip of instructions to follow up all but item number two.
“Everybody knows that crosswords come in pretty much the same pattern ,” said the blonde. “It’s a lot harder to make them up if your pattern is wandering all over the place.”
“Computers don’t ordinarily waste time solving crosswords,” Dean answered. “It’s fine for you to know that this Porpoise is only playing the game by all the rules of puzzle-makers, but that machine downstairs can’t tell the difference in importance between that correlation and the one that tells us that Porpoise is our man “
The second run found another two correlations in the selected puzzles: There was a number or a figure in the solutions of every puzzle signed Avery Porpoise, and the words “Buy,”
“Sell” or “Short” were also constants; every puzzle contained one of the three words.
Output was selected, and ten pages of data rattled off the remote line printer like machine gun fire. The printout was sealed in a flat case, and the redhead carried it personally upstairs to the office where a dozen people were working on the information Napoleon and Illya had gathered during the day. When the dates and numbers were added to the information, a wave of relief passed through the room.
The list of names compiled from buying and selling records broke into three groups, their purchases matching the dates of the puzzles tightly. Quick glances at the prices checked out the clue that had put Illya on the track: when a Porpoise puzzle appeared, at least one third of the investors found their key definition in it, and solved the puzzle. Their instructions were there, and the actual point of transaction was spelled out as a number from zero to seven in a block whose number was the dollars part of each deal. 1 By the time Illya pulled out of the Tunnel, Waverly could tell him his hunch had paid off.
Chapter 7
“This hairbreadth stuff has got to stop.”
Napoleon watched the spacelock close until Arnold and his sick smile were completely shut from sight. Sadists like that make me wish I could transfer to a job with a friendly atmosphere, like cab-driving. He sure gets a kick out of locking people up and flexing his death-traps. Never inclined to take the enemy’s advice, Napoleon decided to see for himself, despite the knives, just how deadly the Space Maze could be.
He started from the spacelock-door in a crouch and made a running leap, clearing the next room and its sliding trapdoor completely. The next alcove was walled with glass and steel, mirrors reflecting mirrors with a hundred Napoleon Solo forms poised on all sides of him, hair disarrayed and every muscle ready to bounce when the next trap was sprung.
Two openings seemed to lead from the little room when he screwed up his vision to eliminate false doors in the reflections. He reached a hand towards one, carefully feeling his way. His fingers brushed glass where there should have been air, and he jerked back in pain. The glass was like fire.
The whole room was heating up, he realized. Not the muggy, drowning heat of the swimming-pool room where Porpoise lolled in ugly luxury, but a dry, baking heat that was less obvious. His skin prickled, and the fine hairs in his ears and nostrils seemed to vibrate. At the edges of his hearing he sensed a roar, a whining buzz, sounds that he couldn’t focus on or really be certain he even heard. He began to sweat. The heat in the center of the room was becoming unbearable, but near the walls there was nearly as much of it, a great physical thing that ground sweat and salt out of him.
Great globes of liquid formed on his hands and arms and brow, and as the heat increased they drew into smaller globes, finally drying on him even as his system pumped more water out. Under his clothes he felt like a walking swamp.
Fire coursed down his leg and sprinkled jingling across the, floor. The coins Apis had left him had literally burned a hole in his pocket and rolled away. Several rolled through the other opening he had been about to follow, bouncing from mirror to mirror. The entire next room suddenly disappeared in a shower of exploding glass as one of the coins rolled against a wall. Tiny fragments of the stuff passed Napoleon, others cut small gashes in his clothing. By some quirk, none actually cut his flesh.
“Those teeth are pulled,” he murmured, staring in awe at the debacle just next door. If he’d gotten into that room before his pocket change had, he might have brushed the exploding mirror as lightly as he’d touched one in the sweat-bath room.
He reached for one of his coins, thinking to use an advance scout again, but fumbled it as his fingers were seared. “Oh well. I didn’t really want to get through here the easy way anyhow,” he whispered as he sucked the injured fingers. He was very careful not to touch anything as he peered carefully through the door to the next room, and found himself looking down a glowing walkway in darkness. There were planets and stars reflected from floor, walls and ceiling.
Napoleon carefully placed a foot on the walkway, and-shock! Current shot up through his leg to arc from his fingers and hair in a pyrotechnical display of high voltage. Against his will one hand clutched the doorway, and a path opened for the current-up his right leg, through the trunk, down his left arm and out the hand. Somehow he kept his head clear, but he knew that a very few moments of this would burst his heart.