The Union Club Mysteries (2 page)
Read The Union Club Mysteries Online
Authors: Isaac Asimov
When we four sat in the Union Club on a snowy evening, the talk was always most relaxed when Griswold was sleeping. That was when we knew the conversational ball would bounce most efficiently.
Baranov said, "What I don't understand about this rash of spy stories infesting us today is what the hell spies are good for nowadays. We have spy satellites that tell us just about everything."
"Absolutely right," said Jennings. "Besides, what secrets are there anymore? If you explode a nuclear test bomb, monitors pick it up. We've got every enemy installation keyed in to a missile all set to go and so do they. Our computers hold
off
their computers and vice versa."
"It's all very boring in real life," I said, "but I suppose the books make money."
Griswold's eyes were tightly shut. From the fact that his fourth scotch and soda was firmly in his hand, nearly full, we might suppose he wasn't sleeping or he would spill it—but that didn't follow. We had heard him snore for an hour and a half at a time and never spill a full glass. He would hold a glass firmly if the rest of him were palsied.
We were wrong this time, though. He was awake. His eyes opened and he said, "The trouble is you don't know anything about spies. Nobody does." And he raised his glass to sip at it.
"Even spies know nothing about spies," he said!—
*
*
*
I wasn't exactly a spy during World War II [said Griswold], at least in my own evaluation of the matter.
No beautiful woman sought me out in terror and asked me to take charge of a microfilm at the risk of my life. I was never pursued up and over the Statue of Liberty or the Golden Gate Bridge by sinister villains with Lugers in their overcoat pockets. I was never sent behind enemy lines in order to blow up a key installation.
As a matter of fact, I was a youngster in my early twenties who sat around a Philadelphia laboratory and wondered why it was that the draft never seemed to touch me. When I tried to volunteer, I was thrown out of the recruiting office. When I tried to talk to my draft board, I was told they were all out of town.
It was many years later that I decided I was kept in civilian life because of my duties as a spy.
You see, the thing about spies that most people don't know is that none of them really know what they're doing. They can't know; it wouldn't be safe for them to know. As soon as a spy knows too much, he can hurt the cause if he's taken. If a spy knows too much, he becomes valuable and he can be tempted to defect, or to get drunk and talk, or to meet some glamorous woman and end up whispering in her ear.
A spy is safe only when he is ignorant. He is safest when he doesn't even know he's a spy.
Somewhere deep in the Pentagon, or the White House, or some brownstone in Nyack or San Antonio or wherever, there are spy masters who know enough to be important; but no one knows who they are, and I shouldn't be surprised if, in the end, none of them knew it all either.
That's why there are so many idiot mistakes in wars. Everyone without exception has areas of darkness, because too much light would make them each untrustworthy and generals have a talent for choosing areas of darkness in which to operate.
Read your military history, gentlemen, and see if that doesn't make sense out of a lot of the madness.
Well, I was a spy. I was just a kid, so I was in the lowest echelon, which meant I knew nothing at all. I just got my orders, but I thought they just involved my work in the lab. Of course I was a bright kid—as you will not be surprised to hear, gentlemen—and I usually got results. That made me valuable.
Naturally, I didn't realize this at the time or I would have asked for a raise in pay. After all, $2,600 a year wasn't much even in those times. I guess that was another reason they kept me in ignorance. It meant they could economize.
Looking back on it years later, though, I remember one little feat of mine that should have gotten me a thousand-dollar raise—or a Congressional Medal of Honor—whichever was better.
I'll have to do a little explaining.
We were fighting the Germans in those days, you might remember. We were also fighting the Japanese, but I was out of that. I didn't have the eyes for work among the Orientals.
Now the Germans were efficient. They infiltrated us, you know. They sent any number of men into the United States. They sent those men with false identities, false papers, false histories. They did a wonderful and thorough job.
You might ask, couldn't we do the same and send Americans into Germany?
Sure we could, but we never had a chance. The Germans had a pretty homogeneous society and we didn't. We are a melting pot. We've got all kinds of accents here and all kinds of ethnicities.
If one of our agents made some small error in Germany, they'd have him strung up by the thumbs before he was quite finished with the error. Over here, we've got to wait for ten or twelve months before we're sure whether someone's a German agent or an honest and loyal Mitteleuropean-American or something.
So we were always running behind. Naturally, I knew nothing of this. No one did except maybe five people who knew 25 percent apiece. I know that comes to a total of 125 percent, but there was some overlapping.
My talent was that I could spot phonies. That's what kept me out of the army. They needed that old infallible spotter—me.
So when they had some true-blue American who had perpetrated what might be (or what might not be) a floater, I was put on him. They'd call me in and tell me they wanted to hire someone to work at the Naval Air Experimental Station, where I worked as a chemist, and they weren't sure about his loyalty.
I didn't think much of it. We had a lieutenant commander who suspected anyone who knew any two-syllable words, and whoever it was always turned out to be an honest, decent, income-tax-cheating, draft-dodging American. Except sometimes.
This time I was called in to the commanding officer's office. I didn't know why. Much later, I came across some papers that made it look as though the incident involved something that meant victory or defeat in the war. I haven't the faintest idea why, but the war would surely have been lost if I didn't come through.
Naturally, I didn't know it at the time.
"Griswold," said the commander, "we've got a new man. His name is Brooke. He spells his name with an 'e.' We're not sure about him. He may be a true-blue American. He may be a sneaking, stinking Nazi. You find out for us and don't let him know you're finding out, because we don't want him on his guard. What's more, Griswold, we've got to know by 5
p.m.
and we've got to know it right. If you come up with no answer by 5
p.m.
or with the wrong answer, well, Griswold—"
He lit up his cigarette, stared at me, narrow-eyed through the smoke, and said in a voice that would have chipped granite, "If you fail, Griswold, you can forget about any promotions."
That
really
put the pressure on me. If I had known the course of the war was at stake, I could have shrugged it off. Losing a war is just an item in history, but losing a promotion is a personal tragedy.
I looked at my watch. It was 10:15
a.m.,
which would have given me nearly seven hours.
I didn't get to meet him for half an hour; and then one of the lab managers felt it incumbent to spend two hours explaining the new man's duties to him.
It wasn't till nearly 2
p.m.
that we found ourselves at adjacent lab desks, and I could really strike up a conversation with him.
He was a very pleasant fellow, which was a mark against him, of course, because a secret agent tries to be pleasant. The trouble is that so do a certain percentage of loyal people—not many, but enough do so to confuse the issue.
I assumed he wouldn't mind a little gentle probing. He would expect it and he would be bound to cooperate.
For one thing, if he held back, that would be suspicious. If he were an enemy agent, reserve might attract attention to him and he would be shot. If he were not an enemy agent, reserve might indicate stupidity and he might be promoted into an administrative position. Both eventualities were equally undesirable.
Besides this, German agents sent to infiltrate defense agencies inside the United States tended to glory in their ability to withstand probing, and they seemed to invite questions.
After all, they were chosen from those who had spent their early years in the United States, so that they could easily slip back into American idiomatic English, and, in addition, they were thoroughly grounded in American trivia.