“Well,” I said, “an abductive statistician would say that we have a family of hypotheses that the two documents actually contain the same information, or part of the same information, in forms which are somehow mutually translatable; that is, with enough information, the maker of one list could always explain his differences with the maker of the other list. And therefore the genuine unknown is the relation between the two documents. If we add more documents to the pile, they might determine the relationship.”
“And could the relationship be anything as simple as one being true and one being false?” Helen asked. “Lyle, I’m alarmed at what you do for a living.”
“It could very easily be the case. For example, say you go looking for your glasses.”
“Usually when I do that they’re on my forehead.”
“Just so. You have a family of hypotheses: forehead, on the nightstand, folded into the bedclothes, used as a bookmark, and so forth. You draw a hypothesis from that family—which you make as small a family as you can before drawing—and test it. Say it turns out false. Then you add the assumption that any hypothesis which has tested false is still false, and on that grounds you keep testing new ones till you find one that is true—which establishes a relation with all the other hypotheses.”
“But I don’t care about all the places my glasses aren’t, once I find them.”
“Nevertheless you’ve established it.”
“Good enough,” Iphwin said. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“I wish I knew where,” I admitted. “I really don’t understand why you can’t just tell us what’s going on.”
Iphwin nodded. “I hold a family of hypotheses to the effect that telling you, at this time, might imperil discoveries I will need later. It may not, for all I know. But I prefer not to run the risk. And if it does cost us the further discoveries, the consequences may be grave for everyone, and therefore I won’t tell you until I am sure I am not going to screw something up. But I do want you to know that this isn’t my choice.”
Helen sat down and cocked her head to one side, looking at Iphwin as if he had just tried to put one over on her. “All right, then, is there any way you can tell us who or what your adversary is?”
“I wish I could. I have a whole series of guesses based on various experiences and encounters with the forces that oppose me. Many of these experiences point to contradictory conclusions. Others complement each other, of course.”
“I guess what you’re trying to tell me is that the weirdness in the world”—I thought I understood what he was saying but couldn’t believe he was saying it—”everything from the fuel consumption of my jump boat while it was tied up, to the severe discrepancies in our memories, to the behavior of Billie Beard and the way she kept appearing and disappearing—all these things are being caused? I mean, not just like ordinary events, but something is causing them to be contradictory?”
“Or the indeterminacy may be a form of attack on my business,” Iphwin said. “Make the world unpredictable enough and capitalism becomes impossible, and it so happens I am a capitalist. I have a very large array of holdings. A couple of years ago I became aware that many things were happening that looked like coincidences but seemed to be happening too often; then on top of that, the explanations that seemed to suggest themselves rapidly became mutually contradictory. Some very good mathematicians—you would know their names, Lyle, but no, I may not tell them to you—working under a covert contract from me, concluded that the odds of all these things happening were very low, but of course that means little; the odds of any one configuration of the world are low, but the world always ends up in some configuration or other. They also compiled a list of other things that might happen, incidents that might fit a pattern established by the previous incidents, and to my deep surprise those predictions began to come true. In the words of a fellow American, a few generations back, ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.’
“Furthermore, as soon as I began to take any steps to identify the enemy and to harden myself as a target, the attacks stepped up and became more elaborate and complex. Now, my researches identified you all as possible assistants in this project. I cannot tell you who is attacking me because I don’t really know. In fact, a secret known to only a few people in my company is that I don’t know anything from before when I was about twenty—as far as I can determine, I have complete amnesia for my childhood and adolescent years, and I seem to have arrived from nowhere— there are no records of me before that time, and yet one day there I was in Edinburgh, able to read, write, calculate, and so forth, with my identity papers in one front pocket—I also knew how to use and present them—and an enormous wad of cash in the other. It is entirely possible that all this originates from some enemy that I don’t know about because they have lain low for fifteen or twenty years.”
“Since you’re an expat who does business in the Reichs,” Helen pointed out, “one obvious possibility is that the American Resistance may have targeted you.”
“You can dismiss that possibility. I am not at all concerned that what remains of the American Resistance might be after me, because I am a primary financier for the American Resistance, I am in contact with it, and I coordinate my activities with it. You are high enough placed in the company so that you might as well know this right off; every so often ConTech is doing something inexplicable because we’re supporting the illegal American organizations around the world.”
“Is that something you should be telling brand-new employees?” I asked.
“You have no idea how long we’ve been watching you, or how much we know about you. You wouldn’t have been hired if I couldn’t be perfectly sure it was safe to tell you this. Anyway, my point is this: as you investigate this problem for me, don’t let yourself get too suspicious about the activities of American Resistance cells and fronts all around my company. They aren’t the ones causing the trouble. I don’t want you to waste time investigating them, and I really don’t want you to blow any of their various covers.”
“You can depend on us,” Helen said, firmly, and I found I was nodding my head vigorously, liking ConTech and Iphwin a great deal more than I had before.
“You’ll pardon my pointing out that I know that, and I should know it—I’ve spent enough to make sure I knew it,” Iphwin said. “Now, the way that I became interested in you was that some of our espionage and intelligence teams developed a very real possibility that we could at least get a rough list of who the adversary was after—that is, we didn’t know who the bad guys were except at the local, low-ranking flunky level, but we did know who they seemed to be out to get. And as it happened, Billie Beard showed up pretty often wherever they were planning to make trouble—and she was all over Auckland last month, but especially hanging around Whitman College. The two of you had already been identified as potential recruits for ConTech, with interesting specialties, and since that was just the category of people she seemed to have an ugly tendency to kill, if she got to them first, we moved as quickly as we discreetly could to get you under our umbrella. The other thing, which interests me very much this morning, is that before being sent after you, she was pulled off a job in Mexico City, where she had been shadowing Jesús Picardin.”
“Who’s that?” I asked. “The name sounds familiar.”
“It should. Picardin is the boss for Esmé Sanderson, who used to be second in command for Colonel Roger Sykes of the Third Free American Regiment. The one that you know in your talk group as ‘the Colonel.’ When Terri Teal got word of your arrest, she called Sykes, who called Sanderson, who talked to Picardin—and he’s the one that dug out the huge file on Beard and dispatched it to Saigon. If anyone did, he’s the one who got you out of jail.”