Thank you, Number One, Nick nodded. Nicholas knew her well; he
personally had ordered her construction before the collapse of the great
liner traffic. Nick had planned to use her on the Europe-to-Australia
run.
Her finished cost had come in at sixty-two million dollars, and she was
a beautiful and graceful ship under her tall light alloy superstructure.
Her accommodation was luxurious, in the same class as the France or the
United States, but she had been one of Nick's few miscalculations.
When the feasability of operation on the planned run had shown up
prohibitive in the face of rising costs and diminishing trade, Nick had
switched her usage. It was this type of flexible and intuitive planning
and improvisation that had built Christy Marine into the goliath she was
now.
Nick had innovated the idea of adventure cruises - and changed the
ship's name to Golden Adventurer. Now she carried rich passengers to
the wild and exotic corners of the globe, from the Galapagos Islands to
the Amazon, from the remote Pacific islands to the Antarctic, in search
of the unusual.
She carried guest lecturers with her, experts on the environments and
ecology of the areas she was to visit, and she was equipped to take her
passengers ashore to study the monoliths of Easter Island or to watch
the mating displays of the wandering albatross on the Falkland Islands.
She was probably one of the very few cruise liners that was still
profitable, and now she stood in need of assistance.
Nicholas turned back from the Trog. Has she been transmitting prior to
this signify request?
She's been sending in company code since midnight.
Her traffic was so heavy that I was watching her.
The green glow of the sets gave the little man a bilious cast, and made
his teeth black, so that he looked like an actor from a horror movie.
You recorded? Nick demanded, and the Trog switched on the automatic
playback of his tape monitors, recapitulating every message the
distressed ship had sent or received since the previous midnight. The
jumbled blocks of code poured into the room, and the paper strip printed
out with the clatter of its keys.
Had Duncan. Alexander changed the Christy Marine code? Nick wondered.
It would be the natural procedure, completely logical to any operations
man. You lose a man who has the code, you change immediately. It was
that simple. Duncan had lost Nick Berg, he should change. But Duncan
was not an operations man. He was a figures and paper man, he thought
in numbers, not in steel and salt water.
If Duncan had changed, they would never break it. Not even with the
Decca. Nick had devised the basis of the code. It was a projection
that expressed the alphabet as a mathematical function based on a random
six-figure master, changing the value of each letter on a progression
that was impossible to monitor.
Nick hurried out of the stinking gloom of the radio room with the
print-out in his hands.
The navigation bridge of Warlock was gleaming chrome and glass, as
