The Müller-Fokker Effect (27 page)

‘Eureka, Amy,’ he whispered. ‘You wouldn’t believe the length them cummunisks will go to. Looky here. The secret of their code is the number
pi
itself!

‘You know how I told you it stood for wheels within wheels—well, it means a lot more than that.
Pi
is the key to the
whole cummunisk conspiracy
!’

He handed her a sheet of paper on which he’d written out the first thirty places of
pi.
Underneath was his translation:

‘First I thought it was a very ordinary message,’ he said. ‘Whatever the rest meant, a ship called the
Sea Nun
was piping nodes of SOS for aid, probably somewhere near the Russky city of Odissa, on the Black Sea.

‘Then I decided the words themselves were code,
PIPE = BRIAR = BUSH = H-SUB. NODE = NO‘D’ = ON ‘D’. SEA NUN = C. NUN = SISTER = RESIST. SOS = MAYDAY = MAY FIRST
(The big Russky holiday),
AID
is obvious.
ODISSA
, that I left alone because it’s on the Black Sea, and
Sea Nun
confirms it. The last word was the toughest,
SOAR
could be
ROSA
. Together with the first word it could mean
SUB ROSA
or
SECRET
, but that wasn’t enough. It also seemed to mean flying. But when I thought about
sub
(submarine)
rosa
(red) and secrets, I realized it must mean rockets fired from H-powered subs, rockets of the Poseidon type.’

He held out the newly-constructed message.

‘So far, so good. Then I took a look at this: the cipher I had used.’

‘
Posieduan R.
Probably a Russky variation of Posiedon, with R for rocket. Now I was getting someplace. But I still wasn’t sure about the D.C. part. I began by retranslating the first five letters, P.O.S.I.E., like this:

‘In the Roman, or “perfect” alphabet, there is no J, so P is the 11th letter from the end and L is the 11th from the beginning. P is a reflection of L, a “new el”. That gave me the first word,
NEWEL.

‘O is zero, nothing, the perfect void. Nothing can come from nothing, so I left it alone, as a word.

‘S being the third letter of our word, I naturally looked to see what words can be formed from S plus any two letters following it in the alphabet. The only three in order that make a word are
STY
. If you write
STY
like this, it becomes a rebus.’

He wrote:

‘That is, “S + wine’ ‘or swine (contained in sty). So the third word was
PIG.

‘I is a speck, the first blemish on the void, the simplest pencil mark or spot. I decided these “Frenchmen” would use the French word for spot,
TACHE.

‘E is the third of the diatonic C-major scale’s tones. It is also the fifth letter. Where there is a third and a fifth, there must be a fourth, and it is of course the position of E in the word
TONES
itself. So our fifth word is
TONS.’

He excused himself from the car and went behind the willow tree for a moment. When he returned, he showed her this new ‘extrapolated’ message and its reversal:

NEWEL O PIG TACHE TONS
SNOT EH CAT GI POLE WEN

‘I wrote this,’ he said wearily, ’in the Pyramid form.’ Another sheet.

‘Removing the shape of the letter
pi
gives:

‘Since Pé is
pi
,’ he concluded, ‘even now our diameters erode! Spelling enters acrostic nuances under number systems. Our side already inserts documents of deception in Secret Service agents’ statements: “O + pen”: a rebus.’

Something peculiar in his tired smile led Amy to suspect that this little speech was itself an acrostic. Grover was having a little joke with her, the magnificent man!

‘If loud offers veer ever…’ she began, but he shushed her.

‘Listen, we can’t get the FBI just yet. If we use the phone on the corner, Pé will see us. If we go to fetch them, he’ll give us the slip. For now, I guess we’ll just have to pin him down and hope for the best.’

‘But couldn’t I stay here and watch him while you went to the FBI?’

He laid a hand on her arm. She felt dizzy. ‘I wouldn’t want to chance it, Amy. You’re too precious.’

Flight 974 from Minneapolis to New York was a peculiar assortment of citizens. At least twenty looked to the stewardess like women dressed up in men’s clothes—unwillingly, or so it seemed, for they spent the first hour after takeoff fiddling with belts and loosening ties, wiggling their shoulders with discomfort. They were going to some kind of convention, and they kept slapping each other on the back and kidding about ‘observing the conventions’ when they got there. Their passports said Male, and Marilyn wondered if they might not just be those ‘queer’ sorts of persons she’d heard so much about.

Then there was that man in the awful wrinkled dirty dinner jacket who kept asking her all kinds of technical questions about the plane—how much fuel it carried, how many miles to the gallon and so on—and finally there were two of the smallest nuns she had ever seen, and a strange veiled woman in black, apparently pregnant.

The two little nuns, midgets almost, sat in back, reading their miniature breviaries and fingering tiny rosaries—and looking apprehensive. Marilyn walked slowly back past all the men and asked if the sisters were feeling comfortable.

‘Oh yes, thank you,’ they piped. The younger one added, ‘My, it certainly is a long ways down.’

‘Yes, we’re at thirty thousand feet now—about six miles.’

‘As much as that!’

‘Don’t worry, there’s nothing to be afraid of.’

‘I was a little frightened after the plane took off,’ the old one admitted. ‘So fast! And all the people down on the ground looked like little dolls!’

They certainly didn’t seem sensitive about their size, so Marilyn squatted by the seat and asked them the question she’d been turning over in her mind ever since takeoff.

‘Are you by any chance an Irish order, sisters?’

‘Oh my, no!’ The older one chuckled, wrinkling her little face like a fist. ‘We’re Little Sisters of the Amish.’

‘I used to work for a religious organization myself,’ said Marilyn. ‘The Billy Koch Crusade.’

‘A very good organization, and a very good man. I’m sure Mr Koch did a great deal of good work before his accident. Sister Mary Jane here just got back from one of our missions among the pygmies. I’m Sister Maia. All our missionary work is with the little folk.’

‘I’m Marilyn Temblor. If there’s anything you need, sisters…’

Seeing the unkempt man was signalling her frantically, she excused herself and went forward.

‘Ah, how much fuel is left now, please?’

‘Don’t you worry, sir. There’s plenty of fuel to get us to New York.’

‘Ah? Ahm.’ He sat back and looked more worried than before.

Next she stopped to see how the woman in the veil was getting along.

‘I hope you’re not expecting your baby real soon,’ she blurted out, and laughed nervously.

‘I’ll let you know,’ murmured the woman.

‘Would you like any milk or anything?’

The muffled voice gave some reply that sounded like ‘Ashes, ashes!’

‘Where’s Fouts?’ asked one of the women-men.

‘Now you know, that’s not a very interesting question,’ replied the one who kept turning around to give the dwarf nuns dirty looks.

‘Don’t listen to Mother Feinwelt. He’s all worked up because them midgets get to dress in nun’s habits and he can’t.’

‘Shut up, Gertrude. As a matter of fact, I told Fouts Friday at six instead of Friday at five. A little schadenfreudian slip there. Anyway, it’ll teach him a lesson.’

Marilyn went forward to fix the cocktails. A moment later there was a timid knock at the door of the stewardess compartment.

‘How far are we from Florida?’ asked the man in the wrinkled dinner jacket. His breath stank of months of steady drinking, his fly was open and his cummerbund turned around sidewise.

‘I don’t really know, sir. Shall I ask the pilot?’

He showed tiny teeth and puffy pink gums in a smile. ‘Oh no, that won’t be necessary. You see, I have here…’ He groped in his oversize jacket pocket for a moment, ‘I have here this gun. So I’ll talk to the pilot myself, if you don’t mind. I want him to fly toward Florida—more specifically, toward
Cuba.’