Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy (40 page)

The intercom buzzed.

“A man is here from the FBI,” Miss Karrig said nervously.

Dr. Dashwood began doing pranayama immediately. “Send … him … in … right … away …“he said between deep breaths.

The agent, whose name was Tobias Knight, had a walrus mustache and a cheery eye; nobody ever looked less threatening. Dr. Dashwood still regarded him with a wary respect, as a large and dangerous mammal. This was the
normal attitude since the 1983 Anti-Crime, Anti-Subversion Omnibus bill had entitled the Bureau to conduct random wiretapping on
all
citizens rather than just on known criminals and known subversives. (“If we only watch the already recognized enemies of society,” the author of this bill—Senator Uriah Snoop—had argued, “who knows what hidden monkey business might be festering in dark places to rise up and stab us in the back like a snake in the grass?”)

Knight was brisk and (seemingly) honest. A prominent scientist—Dr. G. W. C. Bridge—had disappeared and, since no kidnappers had demanded ransom and no evidence indicated that he had defected to Russia or China, the Bureau was investigating even the most tenuous leads. “Since you attended Miskatonic University in Massachusetts at the same time as Dr. Bridge, we’re curious about anything even that far back which might shed light on why he’d want to vanish … if he did vanish voluntarily….”

Dr. Dashwood created an expression of puzzlement. “I hardly knew George,” he said slowly. “He was just about the only Black student at Miskatonic, of course, and that made him um highly visible, but we never became friends….”

They beat around the bush for about ten minutes; then Dashwood shot abruptly from the hip. “I know who really was close to Washy,” he said, looking inspired. “Pete Simon, the geologist. Why don’t you get in touch with him? I think the last I heard he was with the government …”

Knight looked perfectly innocent. “Peter Simon,” he said slowly, making a note. “Geologist.”

But Dashwood
knew:
the agent was a shade too bland, too innocent. The Bureau was aware that Dr. Simon had vanished also. Maybe they were on the track of the whole Miskatonic Group.

Dr. Dashwood experienced a thrill of pure adrenaline. Ever since he had started Project Pan he had known this moment would come, and now that it was here he was handling himself impeccably.

Dum de dum de dum de dum dum.

Who’s Zelenka?

Tobias Knight drove to an old Victorian frame house on Turk Street, where he and Special Agent Roy Ubu had set up temporary headquarters while working on the Dashwood side of the Brain Drain mystery.

Ubu, a smallish, heavily tanned man, was in the living room listening to wiretapped recordings of Dashwood’s recent conversations.

“There’s another bird mixed up in this,” Ubu said. “Guy named Ezra Pound. Every time he calls Dashwood, they talk in some kind of code—’The temple is holy in boxcars boxcars boxcars’ and gibberish like that.”

But Knight became aware that there was another man in the room, slouched in an overstuffed chair in the corner. He was short, fat, and mean-looking; he had at least as much muscle as fat and was probably even tougher than he looked. Knight, who had been a professional
investigator for thirty years, knew at once this man was a cop.

This is an art among professional detectives, and is known as “making” a subject. Knight would walk into a room and “make” everybody at once—as cop, crook, or Straight Citizen.

“This is Hrumph Rumph of the Continental Detective Agency,” Ubu said. “It turns out he has an interest in this investigation too.”

Knight was suddenly ill at ease; it was the first time in years he had failed to catch a subject’s name first time around.

“Hi, Hrumph Rumph,” he said, pretending to cough.

“A lot of strange things have gone on in this old house,” said the Continental Op casually. Suddenly his voice turned cold: “But you’re the strangest, Knight. You’re the Illuminati’s man in the FBI!”

The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees Celsius.

Knight laughed easily. “Now I know you,” he said. “You’re the most famous PI at Continental. You always throw people off guard with wild remarks like that.”

Ubu was confused. “I thought Philip Marlowe invented the technique of starting a conversation with an insult or an accusation,” he gasped, eyes aghast.

“Don’t be a sap, Ubu,” the Continental Op sneered. (He sneered very well, Knight noticed; he must have had a lot of practice.) “This guy is a wrong gee. He’s not only spying on the FBI for the CIA but from what I hear he’s also spying on both of you for the Bavarian Illuminati.”

“All I’m hearing is a
lot of wind,”
Knight said airily. “If you have something to say, say it.”

“Don’t try to
snow
me,” the Continental Op said frostily. “I know all about you and the Illuminati, so don’t think you can pull a fast one.”

Ubu was stunned. “Why are we all talking like characters in a 1920s detective novel?” he injected pointedly.

“It’s him,” Knight grated metallically. “He brings that atmosphere with him.”

“Go ahead and be a
smart-ass”
the Continental Op said mulishly. “But I’ve got my eye on you, Knight.”

Tobias turned and addressed Ubu. “How did this galoot get mixed up in a government probe?” he asked saturninely.

“Professional courtesy,” Ubu said graciously. “Continental is looking for one of the missing scientists, a jasper named Peter Simon. Mrs. Simon says she’d like to have him back, if anybody can find him.”

“Peter Simon,”
Knight repeated stonily. “That’s a funny coincidence—Dashwood mentioned his name not a half hour ago.”

“That’s more than a coincidence—it’s a propinquity,” Ubu said conspiratorially.

“Or a synchronicity,” Knight added occultly.

“I don’t give a flying Philadelphia Potter Stewart what you call it,” the Continental Op said cockily. “It
means
something.”

“Let’s put a tail on Dr. Dashwood,” Ubu growled, barking up the wrong tree.

“I’ll get on that myself,” Knight said chivalrously.

He rose to leave.

“Just a bloody minute,” the Continental Op said sanguinely.

“Yes?” Knight paused.

“I’m
coming
too,” the fat sleuth ejaculated.

   Actually, Hrumph Rumph (or whatever the Continental Op’s name was) was quite right about Tobias Knight.

Knight was the first pentuple agent in the history of espionage. He was simultaneously employed by the FBI, the CIA, the KGB, the Bavarian Illuminati, and a
mysterious person who claimed to represent the Earth Monitoring section of Galactic H.Q.

He was not in this five-dimensional matrix of intrigue for the money, however. Tobias Knight was actually a frustrated sociologist and a would-be historian. He had the Scientific Spirit, or, as he might have stated in the vernacular,
he wanted to know “what the hell was really going on.”
In an age of secret police machinations and conspiracies of all sorts, the only way he could hope to find out what was
“really going on”
was to be involved in as many clandestine operations as possible.

Knight knew what most people only vaguely suspected—that Intelligence Agencies engage in both the collection of valid signals (information) and the promiscuous dissemination of fake signals (disinformation). They collected the information so that they could form a fairly accurate picture of what was really going on; they spread the disinformation so that all their competitors would form grossly inaccurate pictures. They did this because they knew that whoever could find out what the hell was really going on possessed an advantage over those who were misinformed, confused, and disoriented.

This game had been invented by Joseph Fouché, who was the chief of the secret police under Napoleon. British Intelligence very quickly copied all of Fouché’s tactics, and surpassed them, because an intelligent Englishman is always ten times as mad, in a methodical way, than any Frenchman. By the time of the First World War, Intelligence Agencies everywhere had created so much disinformation and confusion that no two historians ever were able to agree about why the war happened, and who double-crossed whom. They couldn’t discover whether the war had been plotted or had just resulted from a series of blunders. They couldn’t even decide whether the two conspiracies to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand of
Austria-Hungary (which triggered the war) had been aware of each other.

By the time of the Second World War, the “Double-Cross System” had been invented—by British Intelligence, of course. This was the product of such minds as Alan Turing, a brilliant homosexual mathematician who (when not working on espionage) specialized in creating logical paradoxes other mathematicians couldn’t solve, and Ian Fleming, whose fantasy life was equally rich (as indicated by his later James Bond books), and Dennis Wheatley, a man of exceptionally high intelligence who happened to believe that an international society of Satanists was behind every conspiracy that he didn’t invent himself. By the time Turing, Fleming, Wheatley and kindred British intellects had perfected the Double-Cross System, the science of lying was almost as precise as Euclidean geometry, and nearly as lovely to the detached observer.

What the Double-Cross experts had invented was the practical political applications of the Strange Loop. In logic or cybernetics, a Strange Loop is a set of propositions that, while valid at each point, is so constructed that it leads to an unresolvable paradox. The Double-Cross people drove the Germans bonkers by inventing disinformation systems that, if believed, were deceptive, but if doubted led to a second disinformation system. They enjoyed this work so much that, at times, they invented Triple Loops, in which if you believed the surface or cover, you were being fooled; and if you looked deeper, you found a plausible alternative, which seemed like the “hidden facts,” but was just another scenario created to fool you; and, if you were persistent enough, you would find beneath that, looking every bit like the Naked Truth, a third layer of deception and masquerade.

These Strange Loops functioned especially well because the Double-Cross experts had early on fed the Germans
the primordial Strange Loop, “Most of your agents are working for us and feeding you Strange Loops.”

Many German agents, it later turned out, had managed to collect quite a bit of accurate information about the Normandy invasion; but many others had turned in equally plausible information about a fictitious Norwegian invasion; and all of them were under suspicion, anyway. German Intelligence might as well have made its decisions by tossing a coin in the air.

   Tobias Knight kept a safe-deposit box in Switzerland in which he stored, one sentence at a time usually, stray bits of true information he had managed to glean from the blizzard of deceptions in which he lived.

The first note in the box, for instance, said:

This had been provoked by a profound search through old science books and magazines, after Knight discovered that most of the Official Science released to the general public was actually 97 percent mythology, intended to serve as a cover or screen for the real science used by Unistat to frustrate its enemies.

There were lots of other notes like that—
Maxwell’s equations seem sound, I don’t think there’s any flummery in Newtonian mechanics
, and so on—but others were far weirder.

Such as:

Knight had a fantasy that someday he would turn these notes over to an Objective Historian who would then write a book informing the future of what had actually been going on in the twentieth century.

Of course this was a dream; all the history departments had been taken over by Intelligence Agencies sometime around 1910, he knew.

And he also knew that there were so many Strange Loops in the Intelligence system that he himself had been deceived many times. Maybe as much as 30 percent of his notes were false, he morosely estimated.

Simon the Walking Glitch entered GWB in Washington at 9:45 that morning.

Simon was an ectomorph: tall, lithe, cerebretonic. His hair and beard were absurdly long and he sometimes smoked weed during working hours. GWB kept him on the government payroll only because he was a genius in his field, which both they and he knew, and because he had long ago inserted a tapeworm in the Beast which edited all input on him to conform to a profile of Perfect Executive, Loyal Citizen, and Cleared for Top-Secret Access.

He was the agent of the Invisible Hand Society within the government’s own highest echelons.

Simon was not the son of Mr. and Mrs. Walking Glitch of course. He had actually been born Simon Moon, in Chicago, thirty-four years ago; but the name “Simon the Walking Glitch” had been adopted by all of his friends for nearly ten years now.

A Glitch, in computer slang, is a hidden program which lies deeply buried in a computer, waiting to flummox, fuddle, and Potter Stewart the head of the first operator who stumbles upon it.