Philip Dick - The Unteleported Man

Mat, she thought. You will not have your police state here at Whale's Mouth, and I warned you; I told you. But, she thought, maybe now they won't either. If that encoded message can be put through. If.

And if, on the Terran side, there is someone smart enough to know what to do with it.

In his ship near the orbit of Pluto, Al Dosker received, routinely, the message transmitted from Freya Holm at Whale's Mouth to the New New York office of Lies Incorporated.

FORGOT TO PACK MY IRISH LINEN HANDKER­CHIEFS.

PLEASE TRANSMIT VIA TELPOR. FREYA.

He walked to the rear of the ship, leisurely, because at this distance from the sun everything seemed entropic, slowed down; it was as if, out here, there was a slower beat of the sidereal clock.

Opening the code box he ran his finger down the Fs. Then found the key. He then took the message and fed it directly into the computer which held the spools that comprised the contents of the box.

Out came a paper ribbon with typed words. He read them.

MILITARY DICTATORSHIP. BARRACKS LIFE ON SPARTAN BASIS. PREPARATION FOR WAR AGAINST UNKNOWN FOE.

Dosker stood for a moment, then, taking the original encoded message, as handled by Vidphone Corpora­tion, ran it through the computer once again. And, once again, he read the message in clear and once again it said what it had to say — could not be denied from saying. And there was no doubt, because Matson Glazer-Holli­day himself had programmed the computer-box.

This, Dosker thought. Out of fifty possibilities rang­ing from the Elysium field to — hell.

Roughly, this lay halfway on the hell side. By a gross count often. It ranked about as bad as he had expected.

So, he thought, now we know.

We know... and we can't validate it.

The scrap of ribbon, the encoded message, was, in­credible as it seemed, completely, utterly worthless.

Because, he asked himself, whom do we take it to?

Their own organization, Lies Incorporated had been truncated by Mat's action, by the sending of their best men to Whale's Mouth; all which remained was the staff of bureaucrats in New New York — and himself.

And, of course, Rachmael ben Applebaum out in 'tween space in the Omphalos. Busily learning Attic Greek.

Now, from the New New York office, a second mes­sage, encoded, arrived; this, too, he fed to the com­puter, more quickly, this time. It came out drearily and he read it with futile shame — shame because he had tried and failed to stop what Matson planned; he felt the moral weight on himself.

WE CANNOT HOLD OUT. VIVISECTION IN PROGRESS.

Can I help you? he wondered, suffering in his im­potent rage. Goddam you, Matson, he thought, you had to do it; you were greedy. And you took two thousand men and Freya Holm with you, to be slaughtered over there where we can't do anything because "we" consist of nothing.

However, he could perform one final act — his effort, not connected with the effort to save the multitude of Terran citizens who, within the following days, weeks, would be filing through Telpor gates to Whale's Mouth, but to save someone who deserved a reprieve from a self-imposed burden: a burden which these two encoded messages via Telpor and the Vidphone Corp had ren­dered obsolete.

Taking the risk that a UN monitor might pick up his signal, Al Dosker sent out an u.h.f. beamed radio signal to the Omphalos and Rachmael ben Applebaum.

When he raised the Omphalos, now at hyper-see velocity and beyond the Sol system, Dosker asked brut­ally, "How's the odes of Pindar coming?"

"Just simple fables so far," Rachmael's voice came, distantly, mixed with the background of static, of inter-system interference as the signal-gathering cone aboard Dosker's ship rotated, tried to gather the weak, far-distant impulse. "But you weren't supposed to contact me," Rachmael said, "unless — "

"Unless," Dosker said, "this happened. We have, at Lies Incorporated, an encoding method that can't be broken. Because the data are not in what's transmitted. Listen carefully, Rachmael." And, amplified by his ship's transmitter, his words — he hoped — were reaching the Omphalos; a segment of his equipment recorded his words and broadcast them several times: a multiplica­tion of the signal to counter, on a statistical basis, the high background; by utilizing the principle of repetition he expected to get his message through to Rachmael. "You know the joke about the prison inmate," Dosker said, "who stands up and yells, 'Three.' And everyone laughs."

"Yes," Rachmael said alertly. "Because 'three' refers to an entire multi-part joke. Which all the inmates know; they've been confined together so long."

"By that method," Dosker said, "out[our] transmission from Whale's Mouth operated today. We have a binary computer as the decoder. Originally, we started out by flipping a coin for each letter of the alphabet. Tails made it zero or gate-shut; heads means one or gate-open. It's either zero or one; that's the binary com­puter's modus operandi. Then we invented fifty mes­sage-units which describe possible conditions on the other side; the messages were constructed in such a way that each consisted of a unique sequence of ones and zeros. I — " His voice came out ragged, hoarse. "I have just now received a message, which when reduced to the elements of the binary system consists of a sequence reading: 11101001100111010110000010011010100111 0000100111110100000111. There is nothing intrinsic in this binary sequence that can be decoded, because it simply acts as one of the fifty unique signals known to our box — here on my ship — and it trips one particular tape. But its length — it gives a spurious impression to cryptographers of an intrinsic message."

"And your tape — " Rachmael said, "that was tripped — "

"I'll paraphrase," Dosker said. "The operational word is — Sparta." He was silent then.

"A garrison state?" Rachmael's voice came.

"Yes."

"Against whom?"

"They didn't say. A second message came, but it added relatively little. Except that it came through in clear and it told us that they can't hold out. They're be­ing decimated by the military, over there."

"And you're sure this is authentic data?" Rachmael asked.

"Only Freya Holm, Matson and I," Dosker said, "have the decode boxes into which the messages can be fed as a binary tripping-sequence. It came from Freya, evidently; anyhow she signed the first." He added, "They didn't even try to sign the second one."

"Well," Rachmael said, "then I will turn back. There's no point to my trip, now."

"That's up to you to decide." He waited, wondering what Rachmael ben Applebaum's decision would be; but, he thought, as you say, it really doesn't matter, because the real tragedy is twenty-four light-years away, and not the destruct, the taking-out, of Lies Incorporated's two thousand best people, but — the forty million who've gone before. And the eighty million or more who will follow, since, though we have this knowledge on this side of the teleport gates, there's no means by which we can communicate it over the mass info media to the population —

He was thinking that when the UN pursuit ships, three of them like black sliding fish, closed noiselessly in on him, reached a.-to-a. missile range; their missiles fired, and Dosker's Lies Incorporated ship was cut into fragments.

Stunned, passive, he floated in his self-contained suit with its own air, heat, water, transmitter, waste-disposal deposit box, squeeze-tubes of food... he drifted on and on, seemingly for eternity, thinking about vague and even happy things, about a planet of green forests and of women and the tinkling noise of get-togethers, and yet knowing dully that he could live only a short time like this, and wondering, too, if the UN had gotten the Omphalos as they had gotten him; obviously their vigilant switchboard of monitors had picked up his radio carrier-wave, but whether they had picked up Rachmael's too, which operated on another band... god, he thought, I hope not; I hope it's just me.