“There’s that, of course,” said Trumbull, “and it may well be that Sandino had been working on the problem for months. Sandino pulled the waiter routine on Pochik last June, and Pochik, out of his mind, screamed at him that he would show him when his proof was ready. Sandino may have put this together with Pochik’s frequent use of the computer and gotten to work. He may have had months, at that.”

  “Did Pochik say something on that occasion that gave the code word away?” asked Avalon.

  “Pochik swears all he said was ‘I’ll show you when the proof is ready,’ but who knows? Would Pochik remember his own exact words when he was beside himself?”

  Halsted said, “I’m surprised that Pochik didn’t try to beat up this Sandino.”

  Trumbull said, “You wouldn’t be surprised if you knew them. Sandino is built like a football player and Pochik weighs no pounds with his clothes on.”

  Gonzalo said, suddenly, “What’s this guy’s first name?” Trumbull said, “Vladimir.”

  Gonzalo paused a while, with all eyes upon him, and then he said, “I knew it. VLADIMIR POCHIK has fourteen letters. He used his own name.”

  Rubin said, “Ridiculous. It would be the first combination anyone would try.”

  “Sure, the purloined letter bit. It would be so obvious that no one would think to use it. Ask him.”

  Trumbull shook his head. “No. I can’t believe he’d use that.”

  Rubin said, thoughtfully, “Did you say he was sitting in his room reading poetry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that a passion of his? Poetry? I thought you said that outside mathematics he was not particularly educated.”

  Trumbull said, sarcastically, “You don’t have to be a Ph.D. to read poetry.”

  Avalon said, mournfully, “You would have to be an idiot to read modern poetry.”

  “That’s a point,” said Rubin. “Does Pochik read contemporary poetry?”

  Trumbull said, “It never occurred to me to ask. When I visited him, he was reading from a book of Wordsworth’s poetry, but that’s all I can say.”

  “That’s enough,” said Rubin. “If he likes Wordsworth then he doesn’t like contemporary poetry. No one can read that fuddy-duddy for fun and like the stuff they turn out these days.”

  “So? What difference does it make?” asked Trumbull.

  “The older poetry with its rhyme and rhythm is easy to remember and it could make for code words. The code word could be a fourteen-letter passage from one of Wordsworth’s poems, possibly a common one: LONELY AS A CLOUD has fourteen letters. Or any fourteen-letter combinations from such lines as ‘The child is father of the man’ or ‘trailing clouds of glory’ or ‘Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour.’—Or maybe from some other poet of the type.”

  Avalon said, “Even if we restrict ourselves to passages from the classic and romantic poets, that’s a huge field to guess from.”

  Drake said, “I repeat. It’s an impossible task. We don’t have the time to try them all. And we can’t tell one from another without trying.”

  Halsted said, “It’s even more impossible than you think, Jim. I don’t think the code word was in English words.”

  Trumbull said, frowning, “You mean he used his native language?”

  “No, I mean he used a random collection of letters. You say that Pochik said the code word was unbreakable because there were millions of trillions of possibilities in a fourteen-letter combination. Well, suppose that the first letter could be any of the twenty-six, and the second letter could be any of the twenty-six, and the third letter, and so on. In that case the total number of combinations would be 26 X 26 X 26, and so on. You would have to get the product of fourteen 26’s multiplied together and the result would be”—he took out his pocket calculator and manipulated it for a white—“about 64 million trillion different possibilities.

  “Now, if you used an English phrase or a phrase in any reasonable European language, most of the letter combinations simply don’t occur. You’re not going to have an HGF or a QXZ or an LLLLC. If we include only possible letter combinations in words then we might have trillions of possibilities, probably less, but certainly not millions of trillions. Pochik, being a mathematician, wouldn’t say millions of trillions unless he meant exactly that, so I expect the code word is a random set of letters.”

  Trumbull said, “He doesn’t have the kind of memory—”

  Halsted said, “Even a normal memory will handle fourteen random letters if you stick to it long enough.”

  Gonzalo said, “Wait awhile. If there are only so many combinations, you could use a computer. The computer could try every possible combination and stop at the one that unlocks it.”

  Halsted said, “You don’t realize how big a number like 64 million trillion really is, Mario. Suppose you arranged to have the computer test a billion different combinations every second. It would take two thousand solid years of work, day and night, to test all the possible combinations.”

  Gonzalo said, “But you wouldn’t have to test them all. The right one might come up in the first two hours. Maybe the code was AAAAAAAAAAAAAA and it happened to be the first one the computer tried.”

  “Very unlikely,” said Halsted. “He wouldn’t use a solid-A code anymore than he would use his own name. Besides Sandino is enough of a mathematician not to start a computer attempt he would know could take a hundred lifetimes.”

  Rubin said, thoughtfully, “If he did use a random code I bet it wasn’t truly random.”

  Avalon said, “How do you mean, Manny?”

  “I mean if he doesn’t have a superlative memory and he didn’t write it down, how could he go over and over it in his mind in order to memorize it? Just repeat fourteen random letters to yourself and see if you can be confident of repeating them again in the exact order immediately afterward. And even if he had worked out a random collection of letters and managed to memorize it, it’s clear he had very little self-confidence in anything except mathematical reasoning. Could he face the possibility of not being able to retrieve his own information because he had forgotten the code?”

  “He could start all over,” said Trumbull.

  “With a new random code? And forget that, too?” said Rubin. “No. Even if the code word seems random, I’ll bet Pochik has some foolproof way of remembering it, and if we can figure out the foolproof way, we’d have the answer. In fact, if Pochik would give us the code word, we’d see how he memorized it and then see how Sandino broke the code.”

  Trumbull said, “And if Nebuchadnezzar would only have remembered the dream, the wise men could have interpreted it. Pochik won’t give us the code word, and if we work it with hindsight, we’ll never be sufficiently sure Sandino cracked it without hindsight.—All right, we’ll have to give it up.”

  “It may not be necessary to give it up,” said Henry, suddenly. “I think—”

  All turned to Henry, expectantly. “Yes, Henry,” said Avalon.

  “I have a wild guess. It may be all wrong. Perhaps it might be possible to call up Mr. Pochik, Mr. Trumbull, and ask him if the code word is WEALTMDITEBIAT,” said Henry.

  Trumbull said, “What?”

  Halsted said, his eyebrows high, “That’s some wild guess, all right. Why that?”

  Gonzalo said, “It makes no sense.”

  No one could recall ever having seen Henry blush, but he was distinctly red now. He said, “If I may be excused. I don’t wish to explain my reasoning until the combination is tried. If I am wrong, I would appear too foolish.—And, on second thought, I don’t urge it be tried.”

  Trumbull said, “No, we have nothing to lose. Could you write down that letter combination, Henry?”

  “I have already done so, sir.”

  Trumbull looked at it, walked over to the phone in the corner of the room, and dialled. He waited for four rings, which could be clearly heard in the breath-holding silence of the room. There was then a click, and a sharp, high-pitched “Hello?”

  Trumbull said, “Dr. Pochik? Listen. I’m going to read some letters to you—No, Dr. Pochik, I’m not saying I’ve worked out the code. This is an exper—It’s an experiment sir. We may be wrong—No, I can’t say how—Listen, W, E, A, L—Oh, good God.” He placed his hand over the mouthpiece. “The man is having a fit.”

  “Because it’s right or because it’s wrong?” asked Rubin.

  “I don’t know.” Trumbull put the phone back to his ear. “Dr. Pochik, are you there?—Dr. Pochik?—The rest is”—he consulted the paper—“T, M, D, I, T, E, B, I, A, T.” He listened. “Yes, sir, I think Sandino cracked it, too, the same way we did. We’ll have a meeting with you and Dr. Sandino, and we’ll settle everything. Yes—please, Dr. Pochik, we will do our best.”

  Trumbull hung up, heaved an enormous sigh, then said, “Sandino is going to think Jupiter fell on him.—All right, Henry, but if you don’t tell us how you got that, you won’t have to wait for Jupiter. I will kill you personally.”

  “No need, Mr. Trumbull,” said Henry. “I will tell you at once. I merely listened to all of you. Mr. Halsted pointed out it would have to be some random collection of letters. Mr. Rubin said, backing my own feeling in the matter, that there had to be some system of remembering in that case. Mr. Avalon, early in the evening was playing the game of alliterative oaths, which pointed up the importance of initial letters. You yourself mentioned Mr. Pochik’s liking for old-fashioned poetry like that of Wordsworth.

  “It occurred to me then that fourteen was the number of lines in a sonnet, and if we took the initial letters of each line of some sonnet we would have an apparently random collection of fourteen letters that could not be forgotten as long as the sonnet was memorized or could, at worst, be looked up.

  “The question was: which sonnet? It was very likely to be a well-known one, and Wordsworth had written some that were. In fact, Mr. Rubin mentioned the first line of one of them: ‘Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour.’ That made me think of Milton, and it came to me that it had to be his sonnet ‘On His Blindness’ which as it happens, I know by heart. Please note the first letters of the successive lines. It goes:

  “When I consider how my light is spent

  Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

  And that one talent which is death to hide,

  Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

  To serve therewith my Maker, and present

  My true account, lest he returning chide;

  ‘Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?’

  I fondly ask; But Patience, to prevent

  That murmur, soon replies, ‘God doth not need

  Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best

  Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

  Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

  And post o’er land and ocean without rest:…’”

  Henry paused and said softly, “I think it is the most beautiful sonnet in the language, Shakespeare’s not excepted, but that was not the reason I felt it must hold the answer. It was that Dr. Pochik had been a waiter and was conscious of it, and I am one, which is why I have memorized the sonnet. A foolish fancy, no doubt but the last line, which I have not quoted, and which is perhaps among the most famous lines Milton ever constructed—”

  “Go ahead, Henry,” said Rubin. “Say it!”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Henry, and then he said, solemnly,

  “They also serve who only stand and wait.’”

  13

  The Good Samaritan

  Two stories ago, I mentioned the matter of the stag nature of the Black Widowers. (I might mention also that I routinely suggest the entrance of women into membership at occasional meetings of the real club and I am promptly wiped out—but lest I sound as though I’m trying to get credit for virtue, I will admit that I never resign my membership in anger at being rebuffed.)

  Nevertheless, I felt that on one occasion, at least, there ought to be a real fight over the matter in my fictional club, even if I never have the guts to reduce it to that in my real-life club. So I wrote “The Good Samaritan” and had a great deal of pleasure in watching Manny Rubin’s reaction to the whole thing.

  The Black Widowers had learned by hard experience that when Mario Gonzalo took his turn as host of the monthly banquet, they had to expect the unusual. They had reached the point where they steeled themselves, quite automatically, for disaster. When his guest arrived there was a lightening of spirit if it turned out he had the usual quota of heads and could speak at least broken English.

  When the last of the Black Widowers arrived, therefore, and when Henry’s efficient setting of the table was nearly complete, Geoffrey Avalon, standing, as always, straight and tall, sounded almost lighthearted as he said, “I see that your guest has not arrived yet, Mario.”

  Gonzalo, whose crimson velvet jacket and lightly striped blue pants reduced everything else in the room to monochrome said, “Well—”

  Avalon said, “What’s more, a quick count of the settings placed at the table by our inestimable Henry shows that six people and no more are to be seated. And since all six of us are here, I can only conclude that you have not brought a guest.”

  “Thank Anacreon,” said Emmanuel Rubin, raising his drink, “or whatever spirit it is that presides over convivial banquets of kindred souls.”

  Thomas Trumbull scowled and brushed back his crisply waved white hair with one hand. “What are you doing, Mario? Saving money?”

  “Well—” said Gonzalo again, staring at his own drink with a totally spurious concentration.

  Roger Halsted said, “I don’t know that this is so good. I like the grilling sessions.”

  “It won’t hurt us,” said Avalon, in his deepest voice, “to have a quiet conversation once in a while. If we can’t amuse each other without a guest, then the Black Widowers are not what once they were and we should prepare, sorrowing, for oblivion. Shall we offer Mario a vote of thanks for his unwonted discretion?”

  “Weil—” said Gonzalo a third time.

  James Drake interposed, stubbing out a cigarette and clearing his throat. “It seems to me, gentlemen, that Mario is trying to say something and is amazingly bashful about it. If he has something he hesitates to say, I fear we are not going to like it. May I suggest we all keep quiet and let him talk.”

  “Well—” said Gonzalo, and stopped. This time, though, there was a prolonged and anxious silence.

  “Well—” said Gonzalo again, “I do have a guest,” and once more he stopped.

  Rubin said, “Then where the hell is he?”

  “Downstairs in the main dining room—ordering dinner—at my expense, of course.”

  Gonzalo received five blank stares. Then Trumbull said, “May I ask what dunderheaded reason you can possibly advance for that?”

  “Aside,” said Rubin, “from being a congenital dunderhead?”

  Gonzalo put his drink down, took a deep breath, and said, firmly, “Because I thought she would be more comfortable down there.”

  Rubin managed to get out an “And why—” before the significance of the pronoun became plain. He seized the lapels of Gonzalo’s jacket, “Did you say ‘she’?”

  Gonzalo caught at the other’s wrists. “Hands off, Manny. If you want to talk, use your lips not your hands. Yes, I said ‘she.’”

  Henry, his sixtyish, unlined face showing a little concern, raised his voice a diplomatic notch and said, “Gentlemen! Dinner is served!”

  Rubin, having released Gonzalo, waved imperiously at Henry and said, “Sorry, Henry, there may be no banquet.—Mario, you damned jackass, no woman can attend these meetings.”

  There was, in fact, a general uproar. While no one quite achieved the anger and decibels of Rubin, Gonzalo found himself at bay with the five others around him in a semicircle. Their individual comments were lost in the general explosion of anger.

  Gonzalo, waving his arms madly, leaped onto a chair and shouted, “Let me speak!” over and over until out of exhaustion, it seemed, the opposition died off into a low growl.

  Gonzalo said, “She is not our guest at the banquet. She’s just a woman with a problem, an old woman, and it won’t do us any harm if we see her after dinner.”

  There was no immediate response and Gonzalo said, “She needn’t sit at the table. She can sit in the doorway.”

  Rubin said, “Mario, if she comes in here, I go, and if I go, damn it, I may not come back ever.”

  Gonzalo said, “Are you saying you’ll break up the Black Widowers rather than listen to an old woman in trouble?”

  Rubin said, “I’m saying rules are rules!”

  Halsted, looking deeply troubled, said, “Listen, Manny, maybe we ought to do this. The rules weren’t delivered to us from Mount Sinai.”

  “You, too?” said Rubin, savagely. “Look, it doesn’t matter what any of you say. In a matter as fundamental as this, one blackball is enough, and I cast it. Either she goes or I go and, by God, you’ll never see me again. In view of that, is there anyone who wants to waste his breath?”

  Henry, who still stood at the head of the table, waiting with markedly less than his usual imperturbability for the company to seat itself, said, “May I have a word, Mr. Rubin?”

  Rubin said, “Sorry, Henry, no one sits down till this is settled.”

  Gonzalo said, “Stay out, Henry. I’ll fight my own battles.”

  It was at this point that Henry departed from his role as the epitome of all Olympian waiters and advanced on the group. His voice was firm as he said, “Mr. Rubin, I wish to take responsibility for this. Several days ago, Mr. Gonzalo phoned me to ask if I would be so kind as to listen to a woman he knew who had the kind of problem he thought I might be helpful with. I asked him if it was something close to his heart. He said that the woman was a relative of someone who was very likely to give him a commission for an important piece of work—”