“Ms. Hatfield,” Thomas said, where did you get this information?”
“I had biology in high school, Mr. Thomas. I was pretty good at it. Remember?”
“Yes, of course. Please go on. What did you do next?”
“Well, the next step was to write the message out as a series of codons, then translate each codon into its corresponding amino acid.”
“Why do that?”
“Well, once you have everything down as the names of the acids, you can calculate the frequency of the names, then you can assign letters of the alphabet to the names. You do this with reference to the frequencies of the letters in an English text. You follow the same procedure Poe used in solving the code The Gold Bug.”
And now The GUAC Bug, thought Thomas. “What frequencies did you use?”
“Poe’s frequency list is adequate: a, o, i, e, h, n, r, s… I forget the rest. But I used linotype frequency, e, t, a, o, i, n, s, h… Quite similar to Poe’s, but probably a bit more accurate for current English, especially as to frequencies of ‘e’ and ‘t’.”
“So you assumed it was a simple substitution code, a given amino acid meant a given letter?”
“To start, yes sir, I thought I’d try that. Actually, substitution is the only kind of code I know. We used to pass notes with it in school. Okay?”
“Of course.” We all did, thought the lawyer. “Go on.”
“After I tabulated the amino acid frequencies in the message, I called the most frequent amino acid, ‘e’. That turned out to be leucine. Also, the ‘stop’ codons, UAA, UGA, and UAG set off several three-letter words that I suspected might be ‘the’. If I was right, that confirmed ‘e’ and right away gave me ‘t’ and ‘h’. So I called proline ‘t’ and that made histidine ‘h’. It looked good. Next I went to the two-letter words. Several had a ‘t’—and pretty soon I had ‘at’, ‘it’, and ‘to’, which gave me the vowels. I filled in all the letters over the names of the respective amino acids, leaving blanks where I had yet to determine the letter. Filling in the blanks was duck soup. ‘t_is’ is of course ‘this’, and since ‘o_’ is probably ‘or’ or ‘on’, I looked ahead a little to see which would make the best sense. If it’s ‘or’, I get ‘_iter’ and then ‘liter’ right away, so ‘o_’ had to be ‘or’. Actually the only two-letter word that gave me any trouble was ‘_1’, but I finally decided the blank was ‘m’, which I got after I filled out ‘hu_an’. The easiest two-letter word of course was ‘__’.”
“Which was?”
“ ‘cc’, Mr. Thomas. What else?”
“Of course. How long did it take you to completely decode the message?”
“About an hour. I’m afraid I sort of rushed it, because I didn’t want to be late for work.”
“I now show you a page of handwritten script. Can you identify this?”
“Yes sir. This is the message as I decoded it and wrote it out.”
“Offer in evidence, your honor, photocopies to opposing counsel and Mr. Gordio.”
Alfrey walked over, snatched the sheets from Thomas’s hands, gave him a venomous scowl, walked back to Gordio. They began scrutinizing the papers.
“That completes my direct. Your witness, Mr. Alfrey.”
“Yes, just one minute, please.” He continued to study the exhibit as he carried it toward the girl. He stopped and appeared to mark something in the text. “Now, Ms. Hatfield… ah, may I call you Betsy?”
“And I’ll call you Reggie? Sure, Reggie, go ahead.”
Grant put his hand over his mouth.
“Well, perhaps on the other hand… we’d best hold off on first names. Ah, Ms. Hatfield, you said the message used only twenty different amino acids?”
“Yes sir.”
“And every letter in the message was represented by an amino acid?”
“Yes sir.”
“You’ve sworn to tell the truth, Ms. Hatfield.”
“Yes sir.”
“But not every letter in the message has its corresponding amino acid, does it?”
“I do believe it does, Mr. Alfrey. Did you have some particular letter in mind?”
“I hand you your own translation, Ms. Hatfield. Would you please read the highlighted phrase?”
“Sure. It says ‘…extracted in a flask…’ Okay?”
“Fine. What amino acid stands for the letter ‘x’, Ms. Hatfield?”
“Oh, I see your problem. Actually, there is no amino acid for ‘x’, or ‘z’, and four other letters, which I forget just now. Whoever designed the message used ‘e-k-s’ for ‘x’. There are amino acids for each of those three letters. That’s what he did. I simply smoothed out the spelling.”
“Ah! You admit you altered the text!”
“I guess you could say that. I also put a period at the end.”
“So you lied when you said—”
Thomas was on his feet, but Judge Grant beat him to it. “Knock it off, counselor,” he growled.
“Withdrawn.” The cross-examiner gave the witness a sidelong glance. “Ms. Hatfield, what arts are you skilled in?”
“Not much of anything, I guess. Except maybe cooking. I make pretty good breaded veal cutlets. And last Thanksgiving I fixed the turkey all by myself, for eleven people. I—”
Alfrey interrupted. “Biology? You had only high school biology, no biology in college?”
“Yes sir.”
“You’re not really an authority in the field of microbiology?”
“No sir.”
“Or pharmaceuticals?”
“No sir.”
“Code breaking? You never worked at Fort Meade?”
“No sir.”
“What’s the chemical name of aspirin?”
“Acetyl salicylic acid.”
That stopped him for a moment. He stood and looked at her, puzzled. “How did you know that?”
“That was the password in our girls’ club when I was in sixth grade.”
Reggie, thought Thomas, you have just dug yourself a hole you’ll never get out of. You have proved one doesn’t have to be skilled in any art to read the code.
The corporation lawyer seemed to sense that cross had not gone well. “Nothing further.”
Thomas said, “No redirect. And if Ms. Hatfield is not needed further, I think she would like to be excused. She has a class at HoCo in thirty minutes.”
“Science?” asked Grant.
She said, “No sir, ballet.” And holding her arms over her head, she twirled in a perfect pirouette, then headed for the door.
The arbitrator sighed, shook his head, looked at his watch. “It’s one o’clock. A choice again—do you want to recess for lunch, or wind it up now?”
“I have no rebuttal,” Alfrey said, “but I do have an important motion.”
“On my time?” clipped Thomas. But then he thought, you are going to shoot yourself in the foot. “Oh well, go ahead, shoot.”
Alfrey drew himself up firmly. “Move to strike Ms. Hatfield’s testimony in its entirety. By her own admission she is not skilled in any art relative to ATCC 06. By prior written agreement, the parties were each bound to offer evidence only from witnesses skilled in the art. A pizza delivery girl simply doesn’t qualify as an expert.”