The passage between the green curtains was as deserted as a forest aisle, and as full of silence. A silence which held in suspension the rustlings and murmurs of hidden life. Periodically a long strangled snore fell through the silence like a falling tree. I hurried past the dangerous snore, but before I reached the end of the car a curtain moved and parted and a small agile figure in striped pyjamas climbed out backwards like a honeybear. I knew that the berth was Mrs. Tessinger’s. The man, tousled, puff-eyed and cheerful-looking, was Teddy Trask.
He laid a finger on his lips and grinned sideways. I followed him to the men’s room without speaking. There he said:
“Caught in the act. Oh, well.”
“Sleep where you like. But I thought it was Rita you were working up to.”
“So did I. For God’s sake don’t tell Rita I slept with her mother. She’d never speak to her again.”
“It would be just as embarrassing for me as it would be for Rita.”
“Yeah, and it would be twice as embarrassing for me. Oh, well.”
I filled a washbowl with water and unwrapped a piece of soap. “I was under the impression that you liked them young.”
“It didn’t work out that way. Christ, I was practically raped. I guess it worked out all right, though. I can’t complain.”
The swirling water in the metal bowl seemed especially clear and hot. My senses were quick and appreciative. The rather sordid irony of Teddy Trask’s affair with Mrs. Tessinger struck me as intensely amusing. I felt simultaneously alert and relaxed, ready for anything.
An hour or so later at early breakfast, I had a chance to ask Teddy for more information about his time code:
“You said you’d offered it to the Army Signal Corps. Could it be used on the radio, do you think?”
“I don’t see why not,” he said, sliding easily into his favorite subject. “You could go on the air and broadcast nothing but a tick every now and then. The enemy wouldn’t even have to know you were broadcasting. But if they did, all they’d hear would be the same sound repeated at irregular intervals. That’s where this code is different from any other code. The signals themselves don’t mean anything. The meaning is in the time between them.”
“We use the same principle in whistle signals. A six-second blast means one thing. A twelve-second blast means something else.”
“That’s right, it’s the same principle,” he admitted.
“Say the Army used your code. Wouldn’t it take a long time to pass on a little information? And wouldn’t the number of things you could say be pretty limited?”
He sipped his black coffee and lit a cigarette. “Sure, I admit that. That’s probably the reason the Army turned it down. That and the fact that I wasn’t a brass hat, or even a second lieutenant. But don’t forget that you could work it out much finer on the air, with clocks synchronized to one-fifth of a second. That gives you five hundred meanings per one hundred seconds, if you take a fifth of a second as your unit.”
“But then you’d still be limited to saying five hundred things and if your message was the five hundredth meaning you’d have to wait a hundred seconds between ticks. It would take you a hundred seconds to say it.”
“That’s right, too. It’s slow. But I never thought it could be anything but a special-purpose code.”
“And wouldn’t an enemy cryptanalyst catch on pretty fast to your limited list of prearranged meanings?”
“That’s where you’re wrong, boy. Unless he had a time-sense better than any I’ve ever heard of, your enemy cryptanalyst wouldn’t ever know he was listening to a code. That’s the beauty of it. It could be used in guerrilla warfare, by advance agents in enemy country. But say your enemy cryptanalyst had an ear like a chronometer, or caught on some other way and started to time the ticks, you could still fool him.”
“You could change your prearranged meanings at regular intervals, you mean?”
“Why not?” he said triumphantly. “You could change ’em every day. Say, you don’t think the Navy would be interested in this, do you? I still think it’s got possibilities.”
“Maybe it has. I can’t speak for the Navy. I can tell you what C.N.O. would say if you took it to them, though. They’d tell you it was fundamentally insecure because, in the first place, you know about it, and in the second place other people do. Me, for instance. Navy codes are originated by naval officers and by a few carefully chosen civilians, and they keep them under their hats.”
“By God, I never thought of that.” The light of triumph went out of his eyes like small sinking suns. “I’ve been shooting off my mouth all this time. Say, for all I know, maybe they’ve got it. Maybe they’re using it right now, and I don’t know anything about it.”
“Maybe they are. I wouldn’t know.”
I left him with whatever vicarious fulfilment he could squeeze out of that. His ideas had suggested a possibility to me which seemed worth investigating. Sue Sholto had worked in a broadcasting station.
But the moldering body of Sue Sholto and the problem to which her dead face had introduced me were in the Territory of Hawaii, and I was on a train in Arizona. There was a more recent corpse and a more immediate problem to occupy my mind. Why had Hatcher died, assuming that it wasn’t accident? And what, if any, were the relations between Hatcher and Anderson? Though I had no notion of what to do or say when I saw him, I sat in ambush in the club car waiting for Anderson to pass through to the diner, as if the mere sight of his face might suggest the key to the conundrum.
I waited a long time while the breakfast parade went by. Major Wright walking authoritatively on short legs. Rita Tessinger looking fresh and restless. Her mother with a complacent look of pleasant fatigue. The old lady from Grand Rapids armored in purple flowered silk against the menaces to her comfort which her quick old eyes found in every corner. Finally Mary looking very young and beautiful, and deceptively virginal.
I told her about the first two and omitted the third.
“You’re up early this morning,” she said.
“I slept well last night.”
“So did I. I dropped off as soon as my head hit the pillow.”
“And I am the emperor’s white horse and Halsey can ride me any time he wishes. I’ve already eaten breakfast. Shall I wait for you here?”
“Do.”
She went away, her hips moving as if in gentle reminiscence. In a grey flannel dress her body had regained its mystery, and the cycle of desire began again in me.
It was interrupted by the appearance of Miss Green, alone, in a green dress the color of artificial Easter grass and matching green shoes. When she came nearer I could see that she had added jade earrings to her travelling exhibition of jewelry. She looked sick.
“Good morning,” I said. “Have you seen Mr. Anderson this morning?”
“Didn’t you know? Mr. Anderson got off the train.”
“But he told me he was going through to L.A.”
“Oh, he was. But he made a long-distance call to one of his oil-fields, and they told him he better stay in New Mexico for a couple of days. So last night, or I guess it was early this morning, he got off at Gallup. He told me he was going to Albuquerque.”
“I wish I’d known. I would have liked to say good-bye to him. You don’t have his California address, do you?”
“No, he said he moves around so much. He’s got mine, though.” She giggled hoarsely. “Well, I guess I’ll go and see what they got for breakfast. See you later.”