The Union Club Mysteries (8 page)

For the last two or three weeks, Griswold had remained grimly silent during our weekly get-togethers in the quiet library of the reclusive Union Club, a room that, by common consent, no one but the four of us used on those nights.

It was rather depressing, for we reluctantly agreed that the evening lost part of its charm without one of his tales, whether or not they were true—which was something none of us could ever decide.

I said, "Listen. I have something to say that can't fail to draw him out. Just follow my lead."

I turned to the old armchair that had long since fitted itself to the contours of Griswold's angular body and that no one else in the Club dared use even on the evenings he wasn't there, which weren't many.

I said, "I read in the papers that they have now, through use of computers, invented coding systems that are so complicated that breaking them, even with the use of another computer, is impossible."

Baranov said, "Well, there goes the entire profession of espionage."

"Good riddance," said Jennings emphatically.

Griswold's hand had trembled just slightly at my remark as it held the scotch and soda, though I knew there was no chance of his dropping it, even if he did seem fast asleep. With Baranov's remark, his feet shuffled a bit as though he were thinking of standing up and leaving. Finally, when Jennings made his observation, one eyelid went up and revealed Griswold's blue-ice eye glaring at us. He said, "You can send all your codes to the devil. A clever person can send a message in the clear and have it perfectly mysterious—to anyone but the equally clever man who receives it."

"Like yourself, you mean," I said. "Which did you do? Send or receive?"

Griswold took a small sip at his drink and said, "Receive."

I suppose [said Griswold] that there isn't an espionage organization in the world that doesn't have its mole: someone working for the other side who has infiltrated the intelligence community. It's probably the world's hardest, most dangerous and most difficult profession, since a good mole must be prepared to spend years, perhaps decades, of his life, living a lie and working for his host country with complete dedication—except that it is his job to see to it that his own country gets the information it needs without the host country finding out where the leak is.

We have a number of good moles abroad and we certainly count on being plagued by moles ourselves. A good percentage of our effort consisted in moving heaven and earth to locate enemy moles and then moving earth and heaven to maintain the cover of our own moles.

Our best mole was Rudolf Schwemmer—which was his real name, by the way. All the people I will mention in this account are either dead or retired, so it will do no harm to use their names.

Rudolf Schwemmer was a German, of course. Not a German-American, but a German, and an Aryan German at that. He looked the precise image of the heroic young German of the Nazi posters, but he had been no Nazi. He had fought Hitler from the very beginning, had escaped to England in 1938 and then returned to Germany during the war to do what he could to unite and strengthen such elements of opposition as existed there.

He could speak English well enough, but with a distinct German accent, and he was truly at ease only with German. This meant we couldn't use him in the Soviet Union, but he was perfect for work within Germany. For years after the war, he had been part of the East-German spy apparatus, working himself higher and higher in its ranks, and reporting always to us. And through East Germany, we always knew a good deal of what was going on in all the nations of the East European bloc, including the Soviet Union. His real identity was only known to a very few top men in our organization.

One thing we desperately wanted to know was the identity of the mole in our own ranks. That there was one, we were sure. The Soviets knew too much and, by a process of elimination, it was our own organization that supplied the leaks. And it had to be someone of high rank.

That was a terrible blow to those of us on top. When one of us didn't know which of the few others of high rank could be trusted, we all began to fall into a paranoid frenzy.

And Schwemmer came through.

At least he almost came through. We received messages in the usual fashion and by the usual route to the effect that he had the answer and that it was certain. He wouldn't give it, though, until the top men of the organization were all in one room and under guard, so that when the truth was revealed the legitimate members of the organization could place the mole under instant arrest.

So four of us gathered in the conference room, with three guards placed at each of the two exits. We had carefully identified ourselves to the guards, who then, under instructions, searched us for concealed weapons or suicide pills.

We sat around the mahogany table staring at each other somberly. I imagine that three of us were wondering which of the other three was going to be under arrest in the next few minutes, while the fourth, who was the mole, was wondering if he was really facing a long term of imprisonment at the very least. Naturally, he—the mole, I mean—could not have refused to attend, for that refusal would have given him away at once.

I was one of the four, of course. The others were all considerably older than I was, and my betters in rank and experience, but not in brilliance, you can be sure. There was Judson Cowles at the table. He was acting chief of the organization and was then still waiting for Senate confirmation. The second in command was Seymour Norman Hyde, a determinedly friendly guy who always used first names, and who had been in the organization since it was first formed. There was the chief of the code division, who was Morris Q. Yeats. We never found out what-the Q stood for, but it was always my guess that it was Quintus.

Yeats had arranged to have the message brought to us the instant it arrived. No one was to decode it but we ourselves.

The message arrived precisely on time and was delivered by one of the guards, who then stepped back to the other side of the door. The chief himself opened the envelope and removed the paper inside in such a way as to make sure we could all see it. It was a nasty shock when all we found on it was one word: "gift."

"What does that mean, Yeats?" said the chief abruptly.

"I don't know. Do you have any ideas, Hyde?"

Hyde shrugged his shoulders. "I'm as much in the dark as you, Morris. Why don't you call the Code Room? It could be that the message has been switched en route."

The chief looked disdainful at that suggestion, but he called. By the time we were through speaking, it was clear that the message was authentic. It was also clear what had happened.

Schwemmer, our man in East Germany, had sent the revelation just a few minutes too late. He had been uncovered and arrested. They must have been at the door even while he was preparing to send the message and, in the end, with the door breaking down behind him, he had time for only one word, and a short one at that. We were pretty sure that was the last word we'd ever get from him.

"It tells us nothing," said Yeats.

"It may be," said Hyde with a judicious pull at his pipe, "that the word is coded. Is that possible, Morris?"

Yeats, who hated having his first name used in the patronizing manner Hyde always managed to affect said with emphasis, "No—Sy! In the code that Schwemmer used, 'gift' can't be twisted into anything sensible—nor can it in any other code we use. He must have sent it in the clear; no time to send a prepared message."

"But it doesn't mean anything," said Hyde. He didn't mind in the least having Yeats use his nickname. If he had his pseudo democratic way, everyone would. He went on, "Do you see anything there, chief?"

Cowles said, "No, I don't."

I said, "With all respect, chief, we'd better see
something.
We four were the only ones who knew Schwemmer's true identity. One of us must somehow have tipped off the East Germans."

"If one of us knew," said Cowles, "he would have blown Schwemmer's cover long ago. This could mean that all four of us are loyal."

I wouldn't let him get away with that. I wasn't popular with the other three; I was too young to be doing so much talking. But I had to do it, since no one else in the organization had the brains for it. I said, "Revealing Schwemmer's name to the enemy would have risked blowing his own cover. There are too few capable of doing that and he would quickly have been detected. He only did it now, whoever he is, in desperation, since he was about to be exposed in any case if he didn't. As it was, he waited irresolutely to the last minute, wondering if he ought rather to chance Schwemmer's being wrong. If he hadn't waited just a trifle too long, Schwemmer wouldn't have been able to send us even this one word."

"Which tells us nothing," said Cowles.

"It's got to tell us something," I said. "Schwemmer knew all four of us reasonably well. Each one of us has met him at one time or another. This word must apply to one of us."

Hyde said, "Maybe he intended a longer word, but was interrupted in the middle."

Yeats said, "There is no word that starts with g-i-f-t, but 'gift' itself. Look it up in the dictionary if you don't believe me."

Hyde said, "It could have been more words, not necessarily a longer word. Suppose it was supposed to be 'gift horse in the mouth.'"

"What would that mean?" said Cowles, who was beginning to sweat visibly.

"I don't know" said Hyde "because that isn't the message. It could be anything. It's just that we'll never know."

I said impatiently, "'Gift' may mean something."

"Like what?" said Yeats acidly. "Does it refer to you because you think you're God's gift to the organization?"

That was just his jealousy speaking, and I let it go by.

Hyde said, with a thin smile, "Well—Morris—suppose we remember that you were assigned to us from the Treasury Department three years ago and that you're still theoretically on temporary status. You're a gift to us from the Treasury Department."

Yeats said, "Go to hell—Sy. Just remember that the chief is up for confirmation in the Senate. If the Senate pleases, the chief will stay chief; if not, you may become chief, Sy. So the two of you, either one, could be viewed, so to speak, as the gift of the Senate."

"Ridiculous," said Cowles, reddening. "We can't play foolish games like this. If the message isn't a clear-cut indication, it is useless. It is clearly useless. We'll have to try again from scratch."

"Wait," I said. "The message is clear; it is obvious who our traitor is. If you will call in the guards, chief, I will name him and once he is in custody, I will explain how I know. If I'm wrong, he can be released and I, of course, will resign."

Naturally, I wasn't wrong.

I said, "Don't stop now, Griswold, or I knock that scotch and soda right out of your hand."

Griswold eyed me belligerently and, with great deliberation, finished his drink. He put the glass on the table and wiped his mustache and only then did he hunch his white eyebrows at me and say, "You don't see it, either? What idiots!"

He went on. "See here, I told you Schwemmer spoke English but that he was at ease only with German. In the final emergency of his life, with the door breaking down behind him, with the prospect of torture and execution about certain, he had no time to think in any language but German; and besides, the German word was shorter."

"What German word?" asked Baranov, puzzled.

"'Gift' is an English word, but it is also a German word which means something altogether different. The German 'gift' means 'poison.'"

We remained puzzled. Jennings said, "'Poison' makes no more sense than 'gift.'"

"It doesn't?" said Griswold. "With one of us named Seymour Norman Hyde, who likes to be called by his first name? What do you think Sy N. Hyde is, if not poison—and the most familiar poison of all, which has almost the same name, by the way, in English and German."

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Jennings sighed heavily, and the sound seemed to produce an echo in the cavernous, dim and slightly dusty confines of the library of the Union Club. "I'm getting old," he said. "There's no use denying it anymore. I've just had a birthday and my kids are getting suspiciously kind to me. They did everything but tuck a shawl about my shoulders."

I said unsympathetically, "Do you have arthritis?"

"No, I don't."

"Then you're not old. Old age starts when you become creaky; when it hurts to sit down or stand up and when your joints ache even when you're not doing anything. Except for that, sixty feels like twenty if you're in reasonable shape." I said it all rather smugly. I don't have arthritis and I can do everything the twenty-year-olds can do.—That I want to do, I mean; I don't want to play football.

Baranov said, "It isn't arthritis I worry about; it's the gradual decay of mental power. At least you're aware of arthritis when you have it. When your mind begins to decay, you can only tell that you're going mentally downhill by the use of your judgment, which is itself a function of your decaying mind. How many people must be senile and be too senile to tell that they're senile."

Inevitably, our eyes shifted to Griswold, who occupied his usual chair, with his white hair framing his pink and relatively unlined face and his thick white mustache just faintly moist with the last visit of the scotch and soda he had in his hand. Griswold's eyes remained closed, but he said, "From the talk about senility and the sudden silence, I gather you are all concentrating your feeble minds on me. It won't help you. You may all be admiring my powerful mind, but none of you will ever have one like it for yourself. Of course, we may have immortality someday, or at least potential immortality. In fact, we might already have had it in our own time except that—except that—"

He seemed to be drifting off, but I nudged him gently awake. Actually, what I really did was stamp on his shoe. He said, "Ouch!" and his eyes opened.

"What's this about immortality?" I said.

I cannot vouch [said Griswold] for the story I am about to tell you. If it were something I had personally witnessed and experienced, you could, of course, be sure of its absolute veracity and thorough reliability. The essential parts of this story, however, were told me by a stranger a couple of years ago and I can't be sure about it. He may have been attempting to practice on my credulity, which people often do because they judge from my frank and open countenance that I can be imposed upon. Of course, they learn better quickly.

I met the gentleman I speak of in a bar. I was passing the time in Chicago waiting for a plane that would be taking me to Atlanta on business that has nothing whatever to do with the matter at hand, and sitting on the stool next to me was a fellow who had the subtle appearance of being about to go to seed. His jacket had the beginnings of wrinkles, his jowls the beginnings of stubble, his shoes the beginnings of scuff marks. And he looked sad.

He caught my eye and raised his drink to me. He had the beginnings of intoxication. Just the beginnings. He was just sufficiently far gone to talk to strangers. He said. "To you, sir. You have a kind face." He sipped a bit, and so did I, and then he said, "I am sorry you will have to grow old and die, and that I will, and that everyone will. I drink to the needlessly aging people the whole world over." He had the sound of an educated man and the nonsense he was saying made just enough sense to make me curious to hear more. I said, "Will you join me at a table, sir, so that we can discuss the matter privately? And will you permit the next round to be on me?"

"Certainly, sir," he said with alacrity, descending briskly from the stool. "You are a noble fellow."

Well, I am, of course, so I could see that drink had not yet incapacitated his judgment. We sat together at a corner table in a largely empty bar and he began talking at once. He heaved an enormous sigh and said, "I am a chemist. My name is Brooke. Simon Brooke. I received my doctorate from Wisconsin."

"Good afternoon, Dr. Brooke," I said gravely. "I am Griswold."

He said, "I worked with Lucas J. Atterbury. I assume you never heard of him."

"I never did."

"My own feeling is that he was probably the greatest biochemist in the world. He had no formal training in the field and I suspect he never even finished college, but he had a natural flair. Things turned to gold in his fingers as soon as he touched them. Do you know what I mean?"

I knew what he meant.

"You could go to college," said Brooke thoughtfully, "as I did and you would then know all the ways in which a problem could be studied and all the reasons why it couldn't be solved—and Lucas (he wouldn't let anyone call him by anything but his first name) who didn't know all those things would just sit in his chair and think and come up with something that would be just right.

I said, "He must have been worth millions to anyone with problems."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? Well, that wasn't Lucas's way. He didn't want to solve just any problems that were handed to him, except once in a while just to earn some handsome fees that would keep him in funds and allow him to work on the one problem that interested him." "Which was?"

"Immortality. He was seventy-seven when I met him and he had been working on that for seventeen years; ever since he was sixty and had decided that he had to do something to keep his life in existence past his normal life expectancy. By the time he was seventy-seven he was in the last stages of annoyance with himself. If he had started when he was fifty, you see, he could have solved the problem in time, but he hadn't felt the approach of old age till it was perhaps too late.

"So, when he was seventy-seven, he was sufficiently desperate to hire an assistant. I was the assistant. It wasn't the sort of job I wanted, but he offered me a decent salary and I thought I could use it as a stepping-stone to something else. I sneered at him as an uneducated tinkerer at first—but he caught me. When he talked to me about his theories, he used all the wrong terminology, but eventually it seemed to make sense.

"He thought that with me doing much of the experimentation, he might still make it before he died, so he kept me working hard. And the whole project became important to me.

"You see—old age is programmed into our genes. There are inevitable changes that go on in the cells, changes that put an end to them finally. The changes clog them, stiffen them, disorder them. If you can find out exactly what the changes are and how to reverse them or, better yet, prevent them, we'd live for as long as we want to and stay young forever."

I said, "If it's built into our cells, then old age and death must have a reason for existence and perhaps shouldn't be tampered with."

"Of course there's a reason for it," said Brooke. "You can't have evolution without the periodic replacement of the old generation by the new. It's just that we don't need that anymore. Science is at the brink of being able to direct evolution.

"In any case, Lucas had discovered what the crucial change was. He had found the chemical basis for old age and he was seeking for a way to reverse it, some chemical or physical treatment that would reverse that change. The treatment, properly administered, would be the fountain of youth."

"How did you know he had discovered it?"

"I have more than a statement. I was with him four years and in that time I had mice that showed the effects. I could inject an old mouse at his instructions, one that was clearly on the point of death from old age, and that mouse would take on the attributes of youth before my eyes."

"Then it was all done."

"Not quite. The mouse would grow young, frolic about in the joy of youth and then, after a day or two, it would die. There were clearly undesirable side effects to the treatment and Lucas had not, at first, managed to do away with them. That was his final task.—But he never gave me any details. I worked under instructions without ever knowing
exactly
what was happening. It was his mania for secrecy. He wanted everything under his control. So when the time came that he had solved the problem, it was too late."

"In what way?"

"On the day he had solved the problem, he was in his eighty-second year and he had a stroke. It was on that very day—the excitement I'm sure. He could barely talk and was clearly dying. When the doctors gave him a moment to himself, he motioned to me feebly. 'I have it,' he whispered with an articulation I could barely make out. 'Carry on. Preparations D-27, D-28. To be mixed but only after held overnight at—at—' His voice grew feebler. 'At forty degrees—'

"I couldn't make out the final mumble, but I knew the only things that could come after 'forty degrees.' I said, 'Fahrenheit or Celsius.' He mumbled again and said, 'Do it today or it won't, won't—' I said again urgently, 'Fahrenheit or Celsius.' He mumbled again and said, 'Do it today or it won't, won't—' I said again urgently, and lapsed into a coma. He never came out of it and died the next day.

"And there I was. I had two unstable solutions that would not last through the day. If I could mix them properly and inject myself—I was ready for the risk if it meant the chance of immortality—I could then live long enough to rediscover the secret for general use. Or at least I could stay young forever. But I didn't know the key point about the preparation—the temperature."

"Is there much difference there?" I asked.

"Certainly. A temperature of forty degrees Celsius is forty degrees above the Celsius freezing point at zero degrees. Every ten Celsius degrees is equal to eighteen Fahrenheit degrees so forty Celsius degrees above freezing is four times eighteen, or seventy-two Fahrenheit degrees above freezing. But the Fahrenheit freezing point is at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, and thirty-two plus seventy-two is one hundred and four. Therefore, forty degrees Celsius is equal to one hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit.

"Now, then, did I use forty degrees Fahrenheit, which is quite cool or forty degrees Celsius, which is quite warm. Hot or cold? I didn't know. I couldn't make up my mind, so the two solutions lost their potency and I lost my chance forever.''

I said, "Didn't you know which scale Lucas customarily used?"

"Scientists use Celsius exclusively," said Brooke, "but Lucas wasn't really a trained scientist. He used whichever one appealed to him at the time. One could never be sure."

"What did he mean, 'doesn't matter'?"

"I don't know. He was dying. I assume he felt life slipping away and nothing mattered anymore. Damn it, why couldn't he have spoken a little more clearly. Imagine! The secret of immortality, and all of it lost in a mumble that didn't clearly distinguish between Fahrenheit and Celsius."

Brooke, who was quite drunk now, didn't realize how bad it was, for of course the dying man's instructions were perfectly clear, as you have probably seen for yourselves.

Griswold adjusted his position in his chair as though to drop off again, but Baranov seized his wrist and said, "Are you trying to tell me you know which temperature scale this Lucas was referring to?"

"Of course," said Griswold, indignantly. "It's obvious. If you say 'forty degrees mumble, mumble' those mumbles don't have to be either 'Fahrenheit' or 'Celsius.' There's a third alternative."

"Which?" I asked.

"He could be saying 'forty degrees below zero.'"

"Even if he did," said Jennings, "we still wouldn't know if it were Fahrenheit or Celsius."

"Yes we would," said Griswold. "You've heard that forty Celsius degrees is equal to seventy-two Fahrenheit degrees. That means that forty Celsius degrees below zero degrees Celsius, which is the Celsius freezing point, is seventy-two degrees below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, which is the Fahrenheit freezing point. But seventy-two degrees below the thirty-two-mark is forty degrees below zero degrees Fahrenheit.

"Therefore, forty degrees below zero Celsius is forty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. If you say 'forty degrees below zero,' it doesn't matter whether it's Celsius or Fahrenheit and that's the
only
temperature where it doesn't matter. That's why Lucas said, 'doesn't matter.'

"Well, Brooke never saw that little point and I don't think that he has the brains to rediscover the treatment, or that anyone will in our lifetimes. So we'll just continue to grow old."

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