it.”
“Vintovka, launch another observation bird, an eagle this time, with orders to attack the scout most separated from the troop. Injure him sufficiently to require immediate medical attention, but do not kill him.”
“Sir!”
Lunch consisted of roladen and sauerbraten for Guibedo and kielbasa, pirogi, and chanina for Mona and Heinrich, with black beer all around. All of which was synthesized in the kitchen cupboards by the tree house.
Bobby Jackson had grown up in the downtown Los Angeles Boy’s Home. This was his first extended trip into the country, and he was dead tired after roughing it in the desert hills for three days. Despite the friendly jeers of his companions, he had straggled two hundred yards behind the rest of his troop. To keep the others in sight, he scrambled to the top of a large rock alongside the path.
Above and behind him, an eagle calculated a trajectory, folded its seven-foot wings, and power-dived from six thousand feet. As the scoutmaster, a Big Brother donating his time to the home, turned to make sure no one had left the trail, he saw the divebombing bird. “Look out, Bobby! Behind you!”
Bobby turned to see the huge bird coming at him at 150 miles per hour. It was the last thing that his eyes would ever see.
The eagle struck Bobby square in the face. Without stopping, it efficiently plucked out both of his eyes and flew on.
Mission accomplished.
“Heiny,” Guibedo said with brown beer foam on his white mustache, “that was one of the best meals I ever ate. I wonder why Pinecroft, your tree house here, is such a better cook than my Bayon. I used the same gene sequence for their synthesizers.”
“That’s easy,” Mona said. “Heinrich is developing a series of household servants. The darlings are too young to do any work yet, but they have a sort of empathic contact with Pinecroft. They can control its growth to a certain extent, but more important, they can modify the output of the food synthesizer, with the net result that we have a limitless menu of excellent food.”
“Hey! That’s great! That solves the biggest headache I’ve had, getting the food right. Can these servants make a tree house add a room where you want it?”
“Oh, yes, Uncle Martin,” Heinrich said. “But I can’t take all the credit. Mona’s in charge of their training, and doing a wonderful job. I don’t think I could have done it without her help.”
“Yah, Heiny. You sure are a lucky guy.”
The CCU I/O unit in the kitchen, “My Lord Copernick?”
“What do you need?”
“I want to report, sir, that pursuant to your suggestion, I have arranged for you to close on the Golden Hoard mine property next Tuesday morning. Also, I have taken the liberty to cause a corporation to be formed to own the mine.”
“I compliment your efficiency.”
“Thank you, sir. I have had the truck unloaded and the contents assayed. Arrangements have been made to have the gold smelted and sold for forty-five million dollars, through unorthodox channels. The platinum, with an estimated value of seven point four million, has been stored pending the availability of suitable smelting facilities.”
“Hey!” Guibedo said. “Save me maybe twenty of those apples.”
“Certainly, my Lord Guibedo. Arrangements have been made such that you will have a convincingly functioning mine in one week, with suitable machinery, fencing, and so forth.
“Also, the hiking troop has ceased to be a security problem. One of their members was injured, and the others are carrying him out on a stretcher.”
“Not badly, I hope,” Heinrich said. “Mona, why don’t you take Uncle Martin’s truck out there and get that kid to a hospital. I’ll have a bird guide you.”
“Of course,” Mona said, leaving.
“So what do you think of my Central Coordination Unit now, Uncle Martin?”
“Well, Heiny, if them Nazi big shots would have had one of him, we never would have made it out of Germany!”
“My lords,” the CCU said, “I would like to suggest that you use your surplus capital to purchase additional real estate, starting with the balance of Death Valley here.”
“You know, Heiny, that’s not a bad idea,” Guibedo said. “We could build quite a city here. Plenty of sunlight and there’s water in them mountains.”
“I think you’re right, Uncle Martin,” Heinrich said, turning to the CCU. “Do it!”
Later, surrounded by their rough plans for the city, Heinrich suddenly said, “Uncle Martin, what did you want with those twenty golden apples?”
“I thought maybe they would make nice Christmas presents.”
“Ben, you were able to get Mike to talk?” General Hastings said.
“He’s been talking all along, George. It’s just that we’re starting to make some sense out of what he’s saying.”
“So, what does he have to say?”
“It’s not that easy. It’s a matter of word-frequency correlations. You see, George, one of us has to be with him all of the time. If the jamming ever quits, somebody has to be there to sedate him before he drives the rest of us insane. But when you put in a six-hour shift listening to a madman rave, you eventually notice certain words turning up fairly often.
“You see two possibilities as to what the jamming is. One is simply that it is a random noise, transmitted accidentally or deliberately from some natural or artificial source.
“The other theory is that the noise carries information between some people or beings that we don’t know about. If this is the case, the information is being transmitted at a rate several hundred times faster than the human nervous system can function, so most of us telepaths just hear white noise. The possibility exists that Mike’s synapses are fast enough to pick up the data and that the rest of his brain can’t take the information overload.
“Look. The human brain is a series of parallel buffers and gates. Faced with an information overload, such a system will skip a given number of words for each word transmitted.
“On the theory that Mike is repeating every hundredth—or whatever—word in a series of messages, we recorded several months of his ravings and had them transcribed and analyzed by computer. Here is a list of words that appear a statistically significant number of times.”
Hastings looked down at the list of words. Near the top were “Lord,”
“Copernick,”
“Guibedo,”
“Life,” and “Valley.”
“Interesting,” he said.
“I thought you’d like it, George. Then we had the computer synthesize statistically probable messages based on word frequency. These aren’t real messages of course. But they are similar.”
The sheet of paper had a series of sentences like:
“Lord Guibedo is going to Pinecroft.”
“The tunneling in Sector Three is completed.”
“Keep Sector Twenty-two cleared of traffic.”
“Better and better,” Hastings said. “Get all of this over to the Sham Shop analysts.”
“Sure, George. There are reams of the stuff. One other point—there’s a bewildering variety of ancient and modern weapons mentioned, and in just about every language there is. We’re not sure what they stand for, but if these are code words, there are at least several thousand of them.”
