to forgive nonexistent.
Down here also there are champions. Some men just do better than others, by gifts of genes or drive, by luck, by nerve. Miles Lanahan was one such. It was said he could do more with less data than any man in the pit. He became a kind of legend himself, and got so good, made them so scared of his talent, that he actually rose from the pit and entered the real world, the operational realm. It had not happened before in the pit’s living memory. The current champion, however, was Michael Bluestein.
Michael Bluestein, twenty-four, had been a math major at MIT; he had the lazy genius, that unerring sureness of touch that scared everybody too. He also worked like a horse. On the same Sunday afternoon that Chardy struggled to come to terms with Johanna while evading Miles, Michael Bluestein sat in jeans and a polo shirt (Sunday shift cavalierly ignores the unstated dress code — another tradition) in the semidarkness in his cubicle in front of his VDT, nursing a sore left index finger — he played first-base on a softball team (his teammates thought he worked at the Pentagon, which he encouraged because he caught such shit if he mentioned the Agency) and the day before, at practice, he had jammed it, pulling a low throw from the dirt. Now, stuff flowed across his screen, plucked up from the Ongoing Ops file on a random basis by the machine for his delectation, for his best effort. The stuff was Kurdish poetry.
Not that Bluestein was a fan of poetry: he didn’t know T. S. Eliot from Elliot Maddox. But there was a big scam going on up at Security, and a sense of crisis had suffused the entire apparatus. Bluestein, not immune to these vibrations, could feel it. He didn’t exactly know
Funny, there wasn’t much. Only the legendary Melman Report, the postmortem on Saladin II, and since Bluestein wasn’t Blue Level cleared yet, he couldn’t get the code to call it up. But there was very little else to go on; nobody knew much about the Kurds, or maybe some of the stuff was missing from the records. There was no pre- mission dope on Saladin II, none of the working papers or feasibility studies were there. Mildly odd, but not unheard of. There was also no critique scenario of the operation, pinpointing why it went sour. Again, mildly odd, but not unheard of. It wasn’t that he
But there were public documents, material acquired randomly, perhaps as part of Saladin II’s planning, perhaps as part of the postmortem, and never examined terribly closely before. Political pamphlets, position papers, volumes of poetry (the Kurds are extremely poetic), posters, the text of an appeal to the U.N. in 1968 accusing the Iraqis of genocide, the notes of Baathist (reform party) meetings, Command Council decrees, hymns, the usual detritus of a failed political movement, all of it begrudgingly translated into English and programmed into the machine for textual examination.
Bluestein looked at the poem before him. Surely the translation was a poor one, for even allowing for his lack of enthusiasm for the material and even allowing for the Islamic tendency toward flowery, overstated rhetoric, it was simply awful.
ran one bit of doggerel.
Just awful. Only one image arrested him: that “lions of black times” business, although it sounded something like a Roger Zelazny novel, sword and sorcery jazz. At any rate, it certainly was melodramatic.
Crazies. Wild-eyed Moslem fanatics. Imagine writing something so inflammatory, so pointlessly stupid.
Were the Kurds opening a terrorist franchise? Was that what this one was about? Bluestein shook his head. He tended to be moderate and orderly — he was a mathematician, after all — and the rawness of passion, its bald fury and literary artlessness somewhat offended him.
Bluestein had read enough. He cleared a line and typed EN on the screen, directing the computer to remove this one and pick out something new from the Kurdish file.
Another poem! They need an English major, not a math star, thought Bluestein. What was he supposed to make of it, anyhow? The preliminary note explained that this item was from a 1958 edition of
Bluestein sighed heavily, and began to scroll the piece across his screen, trying to make sense of it. It’s only words, he thought. He mistrusted words; give him numbers any time, and to hell with the Theory of Uncertainty. U. Beg is nothing special. More of the same: standard revolutionary garbage, full of flatulent zeal, outrage, the language soaring off into the realm of the ridiculous.
