“How about the waiter?” interposed Avalon, forced into interest clearly against his will.

  Bunsen said, “The waiter was not one of us. He was an old employee, and besides, he was watched too.”

  Rubin snorted and said, “You might have told us you had a man in the kitchen.”

  “I might have,” said Bunsen, “but Tom told me it would be best to tell you as little as possible and let you think from scratch.”

  Avalon said, “If you had incorporated a tiny radio transmitter in the object—”

  “Then we would have been characters in a James Bond movie. Unfortunately, we must allow for expertise on the other side as well. If we had tried any such thing, they would have tumbled to it. No, the trap had to be absolutely clean.” Bunsen looked depressed. “I put a hell of a lot of time and effort into it.” He looked about and the depression on his face deepened. “Well, Tom, are we through here?”

  Trumbull said unhappily, “Wait a minute, Bob. Damn it, Henry—”

  Bunsen said, “What do you want the waiter to do?”

  Trumbull said, “Come on, Henry. Doesn’t anything occur to you?”

  Henry sighed gently. “Something did, quite a while back, but I was hoping it would be eliminated.”

  “Something quite plain and simple, Henry?” said Avalon.

  “I’m afraid so, sir.”

  Avalon said, turning to Bunsen, “Henry is an honest man and lacks all trace of the devious mind. When we are through making fools of ourselves over complexities, he picks up the one straight thread we have overlooked.”

  Henry said thoughtfully, “Are you sure you wish me to speak, Mr. Bunsen?”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  “Well then, when your Mr. Smith left the restaurant, I assume that your men inside did not follow him out.”

  “No, of course not. They had their own work inside. They had to make sure he had left nothing behind that was significant.”

  “And the man in the kitchen stayed there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, outside the restaurant, the taxi driver was your man; but it would seem fair to suppose that he had to keep his eye on the traffic so as to be able to be in a position where he could maneuver himself to the curb just in time to pick up Smith; no sooner, no later.”

  “And a very good job he did. In fact, when the doorman hailed him, he neatly cut out another cab.” Bunsen chuckled softly.

  “Was the doorman one of your men?” asked Henry.

  “No, he was a regular employee of the restaurant.”

  “Did you have a man on the street at all?”

  “If you mean actually standing on the street, no.”

  “Then surely there was a moment or two after Smith had left the restaurant, and before he had entered the taxi, when he was not being watched—if I may call it so—professionally.”

  Bunsen said with a trace of contempt, “You forget that I was across the street, at a window, with a pair of binoculars. I saw him quite well. I saw the taxi man pick him up. From the door of the restaurant to the door of the taxi took, I should say, not more than fifteen seconds, and I had him in view at every moment.”

  Rubin suddenly interrupted. “Even when you were distracted watching the taxi man maneuver to the curb?”

  He was universally shushed, but Bunsen said, “Even then.”

  Henry said, “I don’t forget that you were watching, Mr. Bunsen, but you have said you do not have the proper appearance for that kind of work. You do not watch, professionally.”

  “I have eyes,” said Bunsen, and there was more than merely a trace of contempt now. “Or will you tell me the hand is quicker than the eye?”

  “Sometimes even when the hand is quite slow, I think.—Mr. Bunsen, you arrived late and did not hear Mr. Gonzalo’s tale. He had paid a taxi driver exactly the fare recorded on the meter, and so customary is it to pay more than that, that every one of us was shocked. Even I expressed disapproval. It is only when the completely customary is violated that the event is noticed. When it takes place, it is apt to be totally ignored.”

  Bunsen said, “Are you trying to tell me that something was wrong with the taxi driver? I tell you there wasn’t.”

  “I am sure of that,” said Henry earnestly. “Still, didn’t you miss something that you took so entirely for granted that, even looking at it, you didn’t see it?”

  “I don’t see what it could have been. I have an excellent memory, I assure you, and in the fifteen seconds that Smith went from restaurant to taxi he did nothing I did not note and nothing I do not remember.”

  Henry thought for a moment or two. “You know, Mr. Bunsen, it must have happened, and if you had seen it happen, you would surely have taken action. But you did not take action; you are still mystified.”

  “Then whatever it was,” said Bunsen, “it did not happen.”

  “You mean, sir, that the doorman, a regular employee of the restaurant, hailed a cab for Smith, who was a regular patron for whom he must have performed the same service many times, and that Smith, whom you described as a well-mannered man who always did the correct social thing, did not tip the doorman?”

  “Of course he—” began Bunsen, and then came to a dead halt.

  And in the silence that followed, Henry said, “And if he tipped him, then surely it was with an object taken from the left pants pocket, an object that, from your description, happened to look something like a coin.—Then he smiled, and that you saw.”

  6

  The Three Numbers

  I’m always fascinated by puzzles involving numbers or words. In a way, this is a small tragedy, for I am very poor at solving such puzzles.

  If you create a puzzle, however, then, of course, you know the solution. You might think there is no fun in knowing a solution from the beginning, but it becomes fun if you then invent a story in which the characters don’t know the solution and have to work it out with something important hanging on the event.

  This is a story involving a number puzzle and you have no idea how exciting it is to have your characters sweat it out.

  When Tom Trumbull arrived—late, of course—to the Black Widowers’ banquet, and called for his scotch and soda, he was met by James Drake, who was wearing a rather hangdog expression on his face.

  Drake’s head made a gentle gesture to one side.

  Trumbull followed him, unpeeling his coat as he went, his tanned and furrowed face asking the question before his voice did. “What’s up?” he said.

  Drake held his cigarette to one side and let the smoke curl bluely upward. “Tom, I’ve brought a physicist as my guest.”

  “So?”

  “Well, he has a problem and I think it’s up your alley.”

  “A code?”

  “Something like that. Numbers, anyway. I don’t have all the details. I suppose we’ll get those after the dinner. But that’s not the point. Will you help me if it becomes necessary to hold down Jeff Avalon?”

  Trumbull looked across the room to where Avalon was standing in staid conversation with the man who was clearly the guest of the evening since he was the only stranger present.

  “What’s wrong with Jeff?” said Trumbull. There didn’t seem anything wrong with Avalon, who was standing straight and tall as always, looking as though he might splinter if he relaxed. His graying mustache and small beard were as neat and trim as ever and he wore that careful smile on his face that he insisted on using for strangers. “He looks all right.”

  Drake said, “You weren’t here last time. Jeff has the idea that the Black Widowers is becoming too nearly a puzzle session each month.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” asked Trumbull as he passed his hands over his tightly waved off-white hair to press down the slight disarray produced by the wind outside.

  “Jeff thinks we ought to be a purely social organization. Convivial conversation and all that.”

  “We have that anyway.”

  “So when the puzzle comes up, help me sit on him if he gets grouchy. You have a loud voice and I don’t.”

  “No problem. Have you talked to Manny?”

  “Hell, no. He’d take up the other side to be contrary.”

  “You may be right.—Henry!” Trumbull waved his arm. “Henry, do me a favor. This scotch and soda won’t be enough. It’s cold outside and it took me a long time to get a taxi so—”

  Henry smiled discreetly, his unlined face looking twenty years younger than his actual sixtyishness. “I had assumed that might be so, Mr. Trumbull. Your second is ready.”

  “Henry, you’re a diamond of the first water”—which, to be sure, was a judgment concurred in by all the Black Widowers.

  “I’ll give you a demonstration,” said Emmanuel Rubin. He had quarreled with the soup which, he maintained, had had just a shade too much leek to make it fit for human consumption, and the fact that he was in a clear minority of one rendered him all the more emphatic in his remaining views. “I’ll show you that any language is really a complex of languages.—I’ll write a word on each of these two pieces of paper. The same word. I’ll give one to you, Mario—and one to you, sir.”

  The second went to Dr. Samuel Puntsch, who had, as was usually the case with guests of the Black Widowers, maintained a discreet silence during the prehrninaries.

  Puntsch was a small, slim man, dressed in a funereal color scheme that would have done credit to Avalon. He looked at the paper and lifted his unobtrusive eyebrows.

  Rubin said, “Now neither of you say anything. Just write down the number of the syllable that carries the stress. It’s a four-syllable word, so write down either one, two, three, or four.”

  Mario Gonzalo, the Black Widowers’ tame artist, had just completed the sketch of Dr. Puntsch, and he laid it to one side. He looked at the word on the paper before him, wrote a figure without hesitation, and passed it to Rubin. Puntsch did the same.

  Rubin said, with indescribable satisfaction, “I’ll spell the word. It’s u-n-i-o-n-i-z-e-d, and Mario says it’s accented on the first syllable.”

  “Yoo-nionized,” said Mario. “Referring to an industry whose working force has been organized into a labor union.”

  Puntsch laughed. “Yes, I see. I called it un-eye-onized; referring to a substance that did not break down into ions in solution. I accent the second syllable.”

  “Exactly. The same word to the eye, but different to men in different fields. Roger and Jim would agree with Dr. Puntsch, I know, and Tom, Jeff, and Henry would probably agree with Mario. It’s like that in a million different places. Fugue means different things to a psychiatrist and a musician. The phrase ‘to press a suit’ means one thing to a nineteenth-century lover and another to a twentieth-century tailor. No two people have exactly the same language.”

  Roger Halsted, the mathematics teacher, said with the slight hesitation that was almost a stammer but never quite, “There’s enough overlap so that it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “Most of us can understand each other, yes,” said Rubin querulously, “but there’s less overlap than there ought to be. Every small segment of the culture develops its own vocabulary for the sake of forming an in-group. There are a million verbal walls behind which fools cower, and it does more to create ill feeling—”

  “That was Shaw’s thesis in Pygmalion,” growled Trumbull.

  “No! You’re quite wrong, Tom. Shaw thought it was the result of faulty education. I say it’s deliberate and that this does more to create the proper atmosphere for world collapse than war does.” And he tackled his roast beef with a fierce cut of his knife.

  “Only Manny could go from unionized to the destruction of civilization in a dozen sentences,” said Gonzalo philosophically, and passed his sketch to Henry for delivery to Puntsch.

  Puntsch smiled a little shakily at it, for it emphasized his ears more than a purist might have thought consistent with good looks. Henry put it on the wall with the others.

  It was perhaps inevitable that the discussion veer from the iniquities of private language to word puzzles and Halsted achieved a certain degree of silence over the dessert by demanding to know the English word whose pronunciation changed when it was capitalized. Then, when all had given up, Halsted said slowly, “I would say that ‘polish’ becomes ‘Polish,’ right?”

  Avalon frowned portentously, his luxuriant eyebrows hunching over his eyes. “At least that isn’t as offensive as the usual Polish jokes I can’t avoid hearing sometimes.”

  Drake said, his small gray mustache twitching, “We’ll try something a little more complicated after the coffee.”

  Avalon darted a suspicious glance in the direction of Puntsch and, with a look of melancholy on his face, watched Henry pour the coffee.

  Henry said, “Brandy, sir?”

  Puntsch looked up and said, “Why, yes, thank you. That was a very good meal, waiter.”

  “I am glad you think so,” said Henry. “The Black Widowers are a special concern to this establishment.”

  Drake was striking his water glass with a spoon.

  He said, trying to elevate his always fuzzily hoarse voice, “I’ve got Sam Puntsch here partly because he worked for the same firm I work for out in New Jersey, though not in the same division. He doesn’t know a damn thing about organic chemistry; I know that because I heard him discuss the subject once. On the other hand, he’s a pretty fair-to-middling physicist, I’m told. I’ve also got him here partly because he’s got a problem and I told him to come down and entertain us with it, and I hope, Jeff, that you have no objections.”

  Geoffrey Avalon twirled his brandy glass gently between two fingers and said grimly, “There are no bylaws to this organization, Jim, so I’ll go along with you and try to enjoy myself. But I must say I would like to relax on these evenings; though perhaps it’s just the old brain calcifying.”

  “Well, don’t worry, we’ll let Tom be griller in chief.”

  Puntsch said, “If Mr. Avalon—”

  Drake said at once, “Pay no attention to Mr. Avalon.”

  And Avalon himself said, “Oh, it’s all right, Dr. Puntsch. The group is kind enough to let me pout on occasion.”

  Trumbull scowled and said, “Will you all let me get on with it? Dr. Puntsch—how do you justify your existence?”

  “Justify it? I suppose you could say that trying to have our civilization last for longer than a generation is a sort of justification.”

  “What does this trying consist of?”

  “An attempt to find a permanent, safe, and non-polluting energy source.”

  “What kind?”

  “Fusion energy.—Are you going to ask me the details?”

  Trumbull shook his head. “No, unless they’re germane to the problem that’s disturbing you.”

  “Only very tangentially; which is good.” Puntsch’s voice was reedy, and his words were meticulously pronounced as though he had at one time had ambitions to become a radio announcer. He said, “Actually, Mr. Rubin’s point was a rather good one earlier in the evening. We all do have our private language, sometimes more so than is necessary, and I would not welcome the chance to have to go into great detail on the matter of fusion.”

  Gonzalo, who was wearing a costume in various complementing tones of red, and who dominated the table visually even more than was usually true, muttered, “I wish people would stop saying that Rubin is right.”

  “You want them to lie?” demanded Rubin, head thrown up at once and his sparse beard bristling.

  “Shut up, you two,” shouted Trumbull. “Dr. Puntsch, let me tell you what I know about fusion energy and you stop me if I’m too far off base.—It’s a kind of nuclear energy produced when you force small atoms to combine into larger ones. You use heavy hydrogen out of the ocean, fuse it to helium, and produce energy that will last us for many millions of years.”

  “Yes, it’s roughly as you say.”

  “But we don’t have it yet, do we?”

  “No, as of today, we don’t have it.”

  “Why not, Doctor?”

  “Ah, Mr. Trumbull, I take it you don’t want a two-hour lecture.”

  “No, sir, how about a two-minute lecture?”

  Puntsch laughed. “About two minutes is all anyone will sit still for. The trouble is we have to heat up our fuel to a minimum temperature of forty-five million degrees Centigrade, which is about eighty million Fahrenheit. Then we have to keep the fusion fuel—heavy hydrogen, as you say, plus tritium, which is a particularly heavy variety—at that temperature long enough for it to catch fire, so to speak, and we must keep it all in place with strong magnetic fields while this is happening.

  “So far, we can’t get the necessary temperature produced quickly enough, or hold the magnetic field in being long enough, for the fusion fuel to ignite. Delivering energy by laser may be another bet, but we need stronger lasers than we have so far, or stronger and better-designed magnetic fields than we now have. Once we manage it and do ignite the fuel, that will be an important breakthrough, but God knows there will remain plenty of engineering problems to solve before we can actually begin to run the Earth by fusion energy.”

  Trumbull said, “When do you think we’ll get to that first breakthrough; when do you think we’ll have ignition?”

  “It’s hard to say. American and Soviet physicists have been inching forward toward it for a quarter of a century. I think they’ve almost reached it. Five years more maybe. But there are imponderables. A lucky intuition might bring it this year. Unforeseen difficulties may carry us into the twenty-first century.”

  Halsted broke in. “Can we wait till the twenty-first century?”

  “Wait?” said Puntsch.

  “You say you are trying to have civilization last more than a generation. That sounds as though you don’t think we can wait for the twenty-first century.”

  “I see. I wish I could be optimistic on this point, sir,” said Puntsch gravely, “but I can’t. At the rate we’re going, our petroleum will be pretty much used up by 2000. Going back to coal will present us with a lot of problems and leaning on breeder fission reactors will involve the getting rid of enormous quantities of radioactive wastes. I would certainly feel uncomfortable if we don’t end up with working fusion reactors by, say, 2010.”