Дэймон Найт: Orbit 4

The room seemed warm to Edmonds. A log fire was burning with steady cheerfulness in the handsome fireplace. He knew that Godwin’s chief secretary got to the office thirty minutes early to start the fire, after the old man had once complained of being cold.

“Ben! Come in, my boy.” Oliver Godwin peered up at Edmonds from behind the stacks of books, files, and documents cluttering his big oak desk. “We’ll have a full house at argument today. Have you seen the headlines? Here’s the Daily News: High Court Hears Mindreading Case. And the Post: Assassination Case to Supreme Court. And the Star: Supreme Court Questions Tyson Evidence. Well, I think we’re ready for ’em. I’ve dug up a little wiretap chronology. History, dear boy, that’s the modern touchstone. Bah! Holmes said it first, nearly a hundred years ago. ‘One page of history is worth a volume of logic? ” His hands began fluttering like pink mice through the debris covering his desk. “Strange, very strange. I had it here just yesterday, right next to the nineteen eighty-three Annual Index.”

Edmonds had seen this a hundred times. It always fascinated him. He knew that Godwin made valiant efforts to keep all his papers and files on his desk. Godwin never knowingly filed anything. And although his desk was the largest in the Marble Palace, it had become buried years ago, soon after his appointment to the Court. Thereafter, the heaps could grow only vertically. Still, legend stated that the system had actually worked in the early years. Nothing could possibly get lost; it had to be there, somewhere. And knowing that it was there, Godwin did not mind digging until he found it. He developed the skill, intuition, and patience of a trained geologist in excavating for the exact stratum. Stooping, he could peer at the side of a stack of papers and read them, edgewise, as an archaeologist would read tree-rings, or varve-layers in an ancient lakeside. At one time, Edmonds had wondered whether Godwin would be driven to rediscover carbon-dating. But then came the day when Godwin had mislaid his famous dissent in the double jeopardy case. Laura Godwin had to drive in with his “house copy,” just at robing time. And then and there she had forced his clerks and secretaries to swear an oath in blood, the old man’s wrath notwithstanding, that they would start a decent filing system.

And now Godwin pounded the stacks on his desk and shouted through the rising clouds of dust: “gus!” Although monosyllabic, it was a long, wailing cry, fully orchestrated, a blend of supplication, outrage, entreaty, and indignation.

His senior law clerk, Miss Augusta Eubanks, a lady of indeterminate years, walked in quietly, holding a paper cup in each hand and a file under her arm. “The Tyson file, Mr. Godwin?”

“What else?” he roared. “I’ll bet it was lost in that metal junkheap you keep out there to curse and torment my declining years. Well, hand it over!”

“First, your pills, Mr. Godwin. And we will not have a scene in front of Mr. Edmonds.”

Edmonds took all of this philosophically. He happened to know that Laura Godwin had called Augusta to her deathbed and had extracted her promise to stay with the judge until he retired. He also knew that the old gentleman had set up a sizable trust in Augusta’s name.

The old man meekly tossed down the pills and water. She gave him the file.

“You have to be firm with them,” he whispered as she left. “Patient, but firm. They're the ones the Senate ought to confirm. They think they run the place. And maybe they do.” He flipped the folder open. “Ah, here we are. First wiretapping, California, eighteen sixty-two, after they strung the telegraph across the Rockies. And California was the first state to make wiretapping a crime. But General Jeb Stuart of the Confederate Cavalry couldn’t care less. He had his own personal wiretapper in the field. Doesn’t say how they did it. Shunt tap, maybe. And then Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in eighteen seventy-six, and the real fun began. The New York police had already been actively tapping for several years when the first tapping litigation hit the courts and the newspapers, in eighteen ninety-five. And here’s a note on the nineteen twenty-eight Supreme Court case, Olmstead v. United States. The feds tapped the phone of four indignant rum runners.” He leaned back in happy contemplation. “Prohibition, Ben. Before you were born. Everyone had his personal bootlegger. Speakeasies. The eye at the peephole. The raids. But the bathtub gin—ugh! That’s why they smuggled it in.”

“So what happened to the four rum runners?”

“The Supreme Court said their constitutional rights hadn’t been violated by the wiretap, and that the evidence obtained by tapping was admissible. Holmes dissented, of course. ‘A dirty business ... the government played an ignoble part.’ And do you know, it took us thirty years, but we gradually came around to Holmes’s view. Ten years after Olmstead, in Nardone v. United States, we conceded that maybe Holmes was partly right, but only for evidence offered in federal courts. We still didn’t think the Fourth and Fifth Amendments applied to the state courts. And then finally, in Mapp v. Ohio, we extended the doctrine to apply to the states. In those early days, when we finally did get around to finding a few instances of illegal wiretapping, we made it turn on trespass. Some of the early distinctions were fabulous. If you drilled a hole in a wall and pushed a mike through, that was trespass, and it was illegal. But merely hanging a mike on the outside of the wall was still okay. And if you drove a spike mike into the wall, it was legal if it didn’t go all the way through, provided it didn’t touch a ventilating duct. But of course all these nice distinctions are buried in the footnotes now. Today, any kind of electronic pickup is illegal, and evidence obtained by wiretapping can be excluded in any court in the country, even if the cops wiretapped by a court order. Berger v. New York. But do you think our rulings have stopped wiretapping?”

“I’m sure they haven’t.”

“Indeed not, my boy. In fact, we redoubled it. The police now have to wiretap twice as much to get evidence that they can prove they didn’t get by wiretapping. And telephone wiretapping is the simplest trick in the world. Ex-employees of big city phone companies do it best. They call a clerk in the repair section and ask for the terminai box and location of the ‘pairs’—the two electrodes for a specific telephone. There’re several pairs in each terminal box, in a nearby underground utility conduit. They run a line from the pairs, attach a hand-set, and they’re in business. They might run a dozen fines from a dozen different terminal boxes to an empty room in a nearby building, and have one man monitor all the lines, with automatic tape recorders that start whenever a number is dialed. I think at one time or another every important phone in Washington has been tapped.”

“Surely not our phones.”

“Of course, my boy. We were tapped liberally in nineteen thirty-five and thirty-six, in the Ashwander v. T.V.A. case. And maybe at other times that we never found out about.”

“Holmes was right. It is a dirty business.”

Godwin was thoughtful. “Dirty, ignoble . . . but very possibly necessary. Three-quarters of the racketeers and dope peddlers convicted in New York before the Berger case were caught with wiretapping. Ben, I just don’t know. Surely there are instances where it is justified, say to recover a kidnapped child, or to save the life of an innocent man. Maybe we’re going to have to figure out a way to let the police keep up with the criminal. Telephone tapping is passé, anyhow. The criminals are afraid to use a telephone. The police use bugs, hidden mikes, parabolic microphone pickups, light beams reflected from a windowpane vibrating from voices in the room.”