Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy

hair-do unfinished. That didn't please the Russian lady, and after the others had gone she fixed Mann with a steely stare, told her husband to switch the music down, and said, 'Dr Henry Dean. He lives at a house called La Grange in the village of St Paul Chauvrac, Bretenoux, 46 Lot, France. Do you want to write that down?'

Mann said, 'Dr Henry Dean, La Grange, St Paul Chauvrac, Bretenoux, 46 Lot, France. No, I don't want to write it down.'

'He is not a scientist,' said Mrs Bekuv, 'not an important one, anyway. But he is the contact between the 1924 Society and Moscow.' She smiled and twisted a strand of blonde hair in her fingers. It was the artless gesture of the ingenue, inappropriate for this Rubenesque wife and mother, and yet she had more than enough charm to carry it off.

'That's fine,' said Mann tonelessly. He turned to me. 'Get on to that, will you.'

I looked at him closely. There was something in his voice that I could not recognize.

'I'll do what I can,' I said. I knew that my request to Langley for archive searches at five o'clock on a Christmas Eve would not be received with great enthusiasm.

'Don't try too hard,' said Mann. 'I wouldn't like to be ready to go by tomorrow morning.'

Mrs Bekuv looked from one to the other of us, 'You will go to France?'

'Dr Henry Dean, you say. Well, that's interesting,' said Mann. He said it in a louder voice. It was obviously intended to bring Andrei Bekuv into the conversation.

Andrei Bekuv nodded but did not turn round to meet Mann's eyes. He was toying with his new radio-recorder and trying to pretend he was nothing to do with the conversation.

Mrs Bekuv said, 'Andrei and I were talking about the investigation.'

'And I appreciate that,' said Mann.

She ignored his sarcasm. She went on. 'Our complete cooperation would not only be good for America, it would be very good for you too.'

'I'm not sure that I'm following your implications,' said Mann who was not only following the implications but well ahead of them. He pressed a splayed hand upon his heart. I saw now that what I had always thought was a spiritual gesture was done to check that his collar was buttoned down.

'Promotion and a better pay-scale, more power, a better posting… you know what I mean,' said Mrs Bekuv. This first name we give you freely but if you want more we must have a new agreement.'

Mann grinned. 'You mean you want your share of the prosperity — promotion, and pay-scale.'

'Otherwise,' said Mrs Bekuv, 'we will simply say nothing, until you are fired and a new team sent to work on us.'

'How do you know that I won't get out the rubber truncheons long before I get fired?'

Andrei Bekuv shifted uneasily and fiddled with the volume control so that a few chords of Mozart escaped and ran across the carpet. 'We'll have to take that risk,' said Mrs Bekuv.

'How much?'

'We didn't realize how expensive it is to live in New York,' said Mrs Bekuv immediately. 'With all those smart people at the university, I'm going to have to look my best, you know.' She smiled as if we all shared some secret joke.

'I'll see what I can do,' said Mann.

'I couldn't resist all these new clothes, Major Mann,' she said. 'After all those years in the Soviet Union I was dazzled by the shop-windows, and Andrei insisted that I bought a whole new wardrobe, from shoes to underwear. He said it was all part of our starting our new life.'

'I understand,' said Major Mann.

'Forget what I said just now. With or without an increase in the money, we will both help you all we can.' Mrs Bekuv slapped a menu into Dr Zhivago and slammed the book closed. Then she stood up and smoothed her cornflower-blue silk dress, running her fingers down over hips and thighs in the sort of gesture used by nervous contenders in amateur beauty competitions. She smiled at both of us, and was still smiling as she leaned over her husband and kissed the top of his head.

The waiter arrived with a tray of tea and toast just as Mrs Bekuv went out of the room. Mann took the tray from him and began to pour the milk, and offer the home made cherry cake. Andrei Bekuv took a slice of lemon in his tea and declined the cake. 'My wife gets very nervous, Major Mann,' he said. 'She misses the boy.'

'You knew your son would never join you. He'll be taking his exams next year… you wouldn't want us to try and bring him out against his will.'

'No, no, no,' said Andrei Bekuv. 'What you say is true.. but it doesn't change the facts. My wife can't get used to the idea of never seeing her son again.' He looked away. 'And to tell you the truth, I can't either.'

'Sure,' said Mann. 'Sure.' He patted Bekuv's arm as one might try to calm an excited poodle.

Emboldened by this gesture of friendship, Bekuv opened his loose-leaf notebook. 'I have completely changed my work on interstellar communication.'

'Have you?' said Mann. 'That's good. No more humming hydrogen, you mean?'

Bekuv made some vague noises while pointing at the pages of closely written numbers. 'At first we were looking for some means of communicating through the galactic plasma without dispersion. Obviously this meant using electromagnetic waves. We knew X-rays were no good…'

'Why?' I said in an attempt to join in.

'They can't be focused,' said Bekuv, 'and gamma rays have too limited a range.'

'How limited?' I asked.

'About one hundred thousand miles,' said Bekuv. Mann pulled a face. Bekuv smiled and said, 'But now I am beginning to believe that we should abandon the idea of any sort of electromagnetic waves. After all, we will never be able to converse with another civilization, because each message will take twenty years getting there and another twenty to get back.'

'Sounds like the British telephone system,' said Mann.

'Now I believe we should simply seek to make a mark in the universe… a mark that some other civilization will detect and so know there is some kind of sophisticated life on planet Earth.'

'What kind of mark?' said Mann.

'Not ploughing patterns in fields. There has been a lot of talk about that but it is absurd. The canals on Mars that Schiaparelli reported in 1887 and the Mariner spacecraft revealed as a complete misinterpretation have ruled out that idea.' He turned the page to where there were diagrams and more calculations. 'I am thinking of a cloud of material that will absorb a chosen wavelength of light. This would leave a pattern — no more than a line perhaps — in the spectrogram of a star's light. This would be enough to tell any civilization that there was scientific achievement here on Earth.'

I looked at Mann. He raised his eyebrows. 'What is the next step?' Mann asked, with trepidation evident.

To put this before your Government,' said Bekuv. 'It will cost quite a lot of money.'

Mann was unable to completely suppress a sigh. 'Well, you'd better put this all to me in the form of a report. Then I will see what I can do.'

'I don't want it filed away and forgotten,' said Bekuv. 'I want to talk to someone about it. You have a Senate Committee on International Co-operation. Could I talk to them?'

'Perhaps,' said Mann, 'but you'll have to write it all down first.'

'One more thing/ said Bekuv. 'It's Christmas Eve, could I take my wife to the midnight mass tonight?'

'It doesn't say you are Catholics on the dossier,' said Mann. He was disconcerted, and slightly annoyed. Or perhaps he was feigning annoyance.

'We have lapsed in our church-going, but not in our faith,' said Bekuv. 'Christmas Eve 'has always been a special time for us.'

'Someone will have to go with you,' said Mann.

'I'll go,' I said.

Bekuv looked at Mann. Mann nodded.

'Thank you,' said Bekuv. 'I will go and tell Katinka. Thank you both.' He went away wagging his tail.

'Sometimes I don't know how I keep my hands off that jerk,' said Mann.

'And it shows,' I told him.