15 - The Utopia Affair (13 page)

"Don't worry, sir. I've always tried to pattern my behavior after the top field agents."

Solo sighed. "That will be all, Mr. Harbeson. Back to work."

"Good night, sir."

All he needed now was a few wiseacre agents. He answered the intercom.

"Mr. Whicker is here with the budget summary, and would like to discuss a few points with you."

"Fine. Send him in, but tell him he'd better be willing to be interrupted. This looks like one of those days."

As the door slid open another signal chirruped and Napoleon turned to answer it.

"Askandi here," the voice said over the background roar of what sounded like a helicopter engine. "On the Clipperton assignment. I'm onto something hot, but I need some items checked out. First: is there a factory ship named
Deseado
, home port Champerico, licensed to work this area? Secondly, even if it is licensed, who is it registered to? And thirdly, what are they doing looking for whales in these latitudes anyway?"

"All right, Mr. Askandi. We'll have the information for you in a few minutes." He flicked a tab. "Monitor?"

"Section Four has the questions, sir," said the cool female voice.

A blue light flashed to his left and he activated the vision screen. The round worried face of Carlo Amalfi faded in, and Napoleon greeted him. Without preamble the head of U.N.C.L.E. Europe began. "Mr. Solo, the Paris office has uncovered plans for an attack on the National Bank where most of France's gold stock is stored. The robbers are aware of our surveillance, and are probably working out ways of defeating us, but while they do we can strike at their roots. The support for the operation is American, the plan is apparently British. The London office is already working on it from that end; we'd like you to see what you can do towards giving us a third leg to stand on, so to speak."

"Certainly. What do you have?"

"The full report from Paris is coming through your duplicator at this moment. I can add only that the individual named as the source of financial support has been identified as a registered foreign representative for Rodney Turner Incorporated, which consists of one American with multifarious interests and little sign of any conscience. We suspect he may he investing in this."

Napoleon sorted through his memory and tagged a name. "We've had some interest in him since the Dallas office picked one of his branded matchbooks out of a trashbin behind the local Thrush nest. This may just give us a start towards nailing his hide to our wall."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Sorry. An idiom from his culture. It means…"

"It is self-explanatory, in context. Is there anything we can help you with from here?"

Channel D signaled. "Not at the moment—unless you happen to have some forty-hour days I could borrow."

Carlo shrugged understandingly as the circuit was broken and the audio switched over.

"Buck DeWeese, Flin Flon. Mr. Solo?"

"Right here."

"Can you spare me a minute? Gene Coulson—the kid you sent up—is working out fine. We've got the corner of something very big here, I think. Have you seen the film we sent down?"

Film? He remembered the spool on his desk and glanced over to it, untouched. "Ah, not yet. But it is here." He wheeled his chair over to where he could reach it, and stretched to drop it into a slot in the side of the desk.

"Take a look at it and call me back. We've got a lot of stuff for your technical boys to chew on—footage of claw marks in the steel plates at the radar station, a duplicate of the film of the radar scope that tracked the thing, and a little bit of very shaky and underexposed Super-8 a woman shot of it. Now, I don't claim to know what it is yet—but I've lived around here for quite a while and I know a lot of things it isn't. It isn't a shadow, and it isn't a cloud, and it isn't dust and it isn't a lens reflection, a large bear or swamp gas. As for what it is, it's big, it's fast, it's mean and it kills people and tears buildings to pieces without working up a sweat. And it's real."

About halfway through this speech the rear-projection screen in his desktop flickered and an unsteady image appeared. The automatic circuitry functioned and the picture steadied. By the time DeWeese paused, Napoleon could see the marks that had been described. They were great vaguely triangular gouges in the heavy metal which gaped shattered and torn as though a berserker had gone over them with a huge, hooked, pointed sledgehammer.

"I, ah, have your film up at the moment," he said slowly. "I see what you mean about the claw marks."

"The substance is half-inch armor plate; I don't think we remembered to include a scale—the first big gash is nineteen inches long by three inches wide at the widest."

Solo didn't say anything. For the moment there didn't seem to be any appropriate comment.

The picture jumped slightly and became a fuzzy gray pattern which drifted from side to side almost imperceptibly. "Mr. DeWeese—the second part is the radar display?"

"Right. It's a real-time record; the thing appears about ten seconds in—that'll give you a chance to see a normal readout. It runs about eight minutes. Shall I hang on?"

"You may as well." The fuzzy gray pattern oscillated slowly from right to left, and a blob of light began to form at about seven o'clock, moving horizontally. And a chime sounded three times behind him.

Quickly he muted DeWeese's audio and, keeping one eye on the screen, answered the call. The voice was tense and urgent.

"Come in, New York—New York Headquarters come in please!"

"Solo here."

"Hong Kong. There's another riot, and this place is under heavy attack. I think there's a couple mortars out there—can you hear 'em?"

"We'll get you support inside four hours, Hong Kong. Nobody's available in force nearer than Osaka. Hold on!" He tapped a quick code and an illuminated map faded in on the wall. "I can authorize our team in Taiwan to help you out. They'll be there inside two hours." With one corner of his mind he observed that the blob of light had begun to move upward on the screen and seemed to be growing a little larger.

"We can hold out in here as long as the walls hold, sir," Hong Kong was saying. "Tell your Formosan boys to drop us a few hundred sandbags when they come over."

"Right. And two field arsenals are hereby authorized too."

"Thanks loads. I'll do something for you sometime." Napoleon let the map fade and said, "Monitor?" "Trust me, sir," said the familiar cool voice. He made a note to find out who it belonged to and seduce her when all this was over.

He opened the voice circuit on Channel D again and sank back to watch the radar trace and catch his breath. Suddenly he wondered if the embattled Hong Kong office had remembered to secure the sewer entrances. They would have, since he'd used them himself two or three times for business purposes.

The glow had stopped a little way below the center. "What scale is the radar trace on?" he asked aloud.

"One hundred," said DeWeese without a pause. "Each bend is twenty miles."

"Then the thing stopped about twenty-five miles south by slightly east of the station."

"That's right."

(
And what in the name of Melville was a whaling factory ship doing in Equatorial Pacific waters in the middle of November? And what was going on in the harem in Swat?
)

On the screen the image moved slightly downward again, going back towards the direction from which it had appeared, and then, somehow, began to fade. It shrank slightly, began to dissipate around the edges, and then brightened to a sharp intense point of light which flared and vanished.

Napoleon must have made some sound of reaction, because Buck commented, "Personally, I felt the last little bit was the most interesting."

"Mmmm. Next is the home-movie film?"

"Yes. I clipped in some leader. There's a scratch mark to warn you where it starts because the thing's only on about the first fifty frames or so, and it's clearest on the first."

The scratch flickered and Napoleon squinted. Every thing was a greenish-black with lighter areas in it, the corner of a house in the foreground—and a rearing hump of a figure dark against the stripes of reddish orange that must mark a sunset. The image tilted and blurred, then recomposed as the thing moved ponderously behind the edge of the stand of trees near the house. But it was already clearly beyond the end of a farther line of trees, at least two miles away. And it rose up above the sunset at that distance. He tapped the reverse button and brightened the light. A little more detail showed.

He stopped it on the first frame.

"I'll pass this on to our technical division," he said. "Do you have
anything
beyond the odd manner of its disappearance on radar to make you think it's not a real monster or other natural phenomenon?"

"Oh it's real, all right—but there's something else behind it. I don't want to go into the reasons I think so, but I'm betting on it."

"Very well, Mr. DeWeese. And we're betting on you."

He tapped another key and called Simpson in Section Eight. "We have something for you to study and try to explain concerning that strange thing in Manitoba."

"Oh yes—the Flin Flon Monster."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You should follow the popular press. One of the wire services picked up the story and fastened on the name of the town. It's now a minor national catch-phrase, more or less illustrating my old maxim: When you want to test a new monster, do it near a place with a funny name and no one will dare to take the stories seriously."

"I see. No wonder Mr. DeWeese was so defensive." Channel D chirruped again. "Anyway, I have some film for you. I'll send it down with a note of explanation." He shifted his weight in the chair, touched a switch and continued, "Solo here."

"Good morning, Mr. Solo," said a cheery voice. "Tuber, in Denver."

"Ah, yes. Have you succeeded in keeping the Brass polished and happy?"

"More than that—we're after one who is probably a plant. What I need you to find out for me..."

Napoleon closed his eyes for a moment and massaged them with thumb and forefinger. No wonder Waverly looked so old. Suddenly he wondered if the detachments from Formosa and Osaka had taken off yet—they should have the pacifying gas as part of the standard kit, but it hadn't gotten to all the offices yet. Was the plan to steal the gold from France's reserve only a robbery or something political as well? And did he sense the hand of the British ex-officer and gentleman, Johnnie Rainbow, behind it? And what did it have to do with gold smuggling in Alaska? And what was Askandi doing in a helicopter when he'd been sent a jet and couldn't fly a copter? Then he remembered Mr. Whicker and the budget summary and looked around. There was no sign of him in the office; he must have left again. Oh well, maybe tomorrow. And oh Lord, he thought as he passed Jack Tuber's call through to the top security files and disconnected, when will I have a minute for lunch?

Chapter 12

"You Really Blew It, Didn't You?"

MR. ALDERSON'S usual broad smile was tempered with polite concern as he laid the long strip of computer printout across the desk. "I'm sorry to say your attack has started to crumble, Mr. Dodgson. The delay in bringing up your ground forces left your air cavalry without enough support to hold the third sector."

Waverly leaned forward to examine the list of hypothetical casualties and equipment losses. "And my retreat to Area B went off well?"

"Oh yes. According to the logistic program, he couldn't get any infrared tracking equipment airborne in time to determine your destination after dusk fell. Of course he could guess or assume your bivouac area."

"The troops are ready if he does. I chose Area B be cause it would give us time to entrench."

"Uh-huh. The factor has already been entered in case there should be a conflict tonight. Oh, technically, the reason for the attack delay this afternoon was sabotage—slowing down your armor and infantry."

"Sabotage?"

"Well, in Monday's final set of orders you applied six units to camp security without specification. He applied twenty-five to sabotage, with transportation specified. That portion of his order was held by the computer for the usual period and would be in your brief tomorrow morning as a matter of routine discovery. I happened to be working when the random interval timer released the news that one of your six security units had connected—in effect, your staff discovered that most of your gasoline was polluted. But of course it had already taken it into account in your move order, so your armored didn't make it, and most of your infantry was stranded where you picked them up later."

"I see. What about the aircav? They didn't seem to have fuel problems."

"If you remember, the last time you used them was Saturday afternoon. Sunday their tanks were considered to have been refilled, so the computer decided they were unlikely to have been tampered with. At a guess, I'd say that would've taken at least fifty applied units." He rolled on down the paper to an odd pattern of scattered symbols.

"Anyway, here's the current disposition of your forces. I'll set it up…" The Gamesmaster slipped the paper through a long narrow slot, and a lighted screen appeared in projection. As he adjusted the paper's position, the scattered symbols appeared over a map of the imaginary battleground which was represented by a few square miles of Utopia's vast parkland. When the four registration dots were set at the corners the overlay was locked in place and Waverly began to discuss the way the battle had gone. Alderson's concern over his loss was directed more towards the practical aspects of the Game—had anything not been made clear, were the computer's decisions unrealistic, had anything not seemed fair. The Game was his child and he couldn't help worrying about its development; he admitted this was only the fourth full-scale Game that had been played, and he kept expecting things to go wrong.

His sympathy for a losing player was purely theoretical, however, and never could he have been tricked or enticed into giving a word of advice on the play, though he was always available for interpretation of a rule or an explanation of the Game's relation to real war. Since it was his creation, he could no more have given either player an unfair advantage than he could have infringed his own rules, and the Game meant more to him than did the players. But he was always eager to help them understand it, and Waverly preferred to have the inventor explain and analyze the results of each semi-hypothetical battle. He coded his own orders twice a day and fed them into the Battle Results Computer personally.
Trust no one and fear no one
had been his motto in this game.