Pete Rolving and Karen Karelia were aboard the Daedalus, having been appointed to look after the baby for the duration. Nathan and I were staying at the house—guests of the State—and other members of the expedition—Mariel, Conrad and Linda —had gone to the mainland on a special project. Unlike Floria and Dendra, where we’d previously called, Poseidon had intelligent indigenes. Mariel had gone out to exercise her special talents and make contact.
Pete and Karen were both up and about when I got there—he overstaying the end of one shift and she up early for another. They kept the routine religiously, with what seemed to me to be ridiculous untiring devotion to the letter of their duty. Karen, I knew, would have been grateful for a chance to get out and into whatever action there might be, but with the personnel shortage there was little chance. Pete didn’t mind. He got separation anxiety if he stepped outside the airlock.
Pete made me a cup of coffee. It was one thing that the colonists didn’t have and didn’t have any reasonable substitute for.
“I contacted the bad guys last night,” I told them. “Or the good guys, depending on whether or not you’re a Robin Hood fan.”
“How?” asked Pete.
“Slipped out after dark. Met him in the cemetery in response to his hoarsely whispered invitation. Cloak-and-dagger all the way. He’s a dead ringer for Cyrano de Bergerac, but he also plays guitar.”
“And you signed an agreement in blood, no doubt?” contributed Karen.
“Not exactly,” I replied. “I wasn’t in my best conspiratorial mood. Couldn’t really enter into the spirit of the thing. But he tried hard. Gave me a message in code.”
They didn’t know whether to believe me. I took out the piece of paper and showed them. I also had the package and I dropped that on the table too.
“What’s that?” asked Pete.
“I don’t know yet.”
Karen studied the numbers on the piece of paper. Pete peered over her shoulder.
They went: 688668.585775.971875.7.74.679234.1145874.16831. 598589966.
“Not exactly a long message, is it?” she said.
“That’s just a sample,” I told her. “He says we might get the rest if we crack it.”
“And how are we supposed to crack it without the rest?” asked Pete. “How the hell can we do a frequency analysis with only nine words—if they are words? Could be a string of telephone numbers for all we know. Or co-ordinates. Map reference to Treasure Island.”
I shrugged. “You two have damn all to do all day,” I said. “Take copies and start thinking. Use your intuition.”
It wasn’t really true that they had nothing to do. In fact, they had all the boring work that Nathan and I begged out of on account of being in the field—collating the data we brought in, storing it in the computer, analyzing samples I picked up virtually everywhere I went—soil, crops, blood, and less p1easant things. Nobody really had so much free time that they could spend hours at a time staring at a row of figures and hoping for a blinding flash of insight. The wandering minstrel had hinted that his cronies had spent a good deal of their time working at the whole thing without any significant inspiration. The fact that they were ill-educated didn’t really handicap them all that much. They knew the alphabet.
But Pete took a couple of copies anyhow. It didn’t take long.
The airlock alarm sounded again, and Karen went to let Nathan in. He’d come back at my signal, to check with me before he went about the day’s business.
“Your shadow keeping mine company?” I asked, as he came in.
He shook his head. “I rode out in the carriage,” he said. “With Miranda. She’s my guardian angel for today. We’re going to Farina.”
Farina was an island to the south, one of about forty in the archipelago that had a significant settlement. I’d only seen six so far, and Nathan had visited about the same number. If there were any dread secrets that Philip wanted kept, there were plenty of hiding places.
“Can you get some soil samples?” I asked him. “And sea-water close to the shore? The usual?”
He nodded. He leaned forward and picked up the paper from the table. He glanced at it idly, expecting it to be nothing worthy of his attention, but suddenly snatched it up in surprise.
“Where did you get this?” he demanded.
“That’s what I wanted to tell you,” I said. “The guy with the guitar playing in the market yesterday—he asked me to meet him last night. I got out of the house okay and met him in the cemetery. He gave me that—also a packet of some foul-tasting white powder. He’s playing his cards close to his chest but I think there’s something significant in it somewhere.”
“I’ll bet there is,” he muttered, still looking at the numbers. “Who is he?”
“He didn’t give his name. But he’s no friend of Philip’s. I guess he’s as close to opposition as we’re likely to find. A bandit, maybe, or a rebel. Impossible to say what might be behind him.”
“And you slipped out of the house in the early hours to meet him?”
“What was I supposed to do?” I asked. “Report him to the gendarmes?”
“It was a risk. If they find an excuse to get mad with us they might just take it, you know. We’re not exactly popular. If they figure out a pretext to tell us to get the hell out we’ll be in a difficult situation. If they only knew how much authority we don’t have they might do it anyhow.”
“They won’t do that while they still think they stand a chance of persuading us that everything in the garden’s roses,” I said. “And besides which, they don’t know. Nobody saw me. So tell me about the paper. What’s it mean?”
“As to that?” he said. “I haven’t a clue. But what I have got is another copy of the puzzle.”
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a very similar bit of paper. He gave them both to me and I compared them. They were both handwritten in black ink, but neither the writing nor the ink was the same. The only difference was that Nathan’s copy had one more number on it. Just a pair of digits: 16.
“They obviously think you need more help,” I said. “They’ve given you an extra one. Who was it?”
“Miranda,” he answered, pensively.
That was a surprise. Miranda was one of the legions of cousins. Her surname wasn’t Wildeblood, or even Zarnecki, but she seemed well in, especially with Zarnecki. She seemed to have been assigned to Nathan in much the same way that Elkanah had been assigned to me—something which seemed to me to be monumentally unfair. Not only was she one of the masters while Elkanah was a servant but she was pretty and he was not. They seemed to have an altogether mistaken idea of the relative status of myself and Nathan.
“Why would Miranda be passing you bits of coded message?” I asked.
“The obvious answer,” he said, “is that she wants the key to the code. That, after all, is what she asked me, in her guileless fashion.”
“Didn’t she tell you what it was or why she was asking? Hell, she must have said something.”
Nathan shook his head. “She treated it as if it were a game. A kind of coquettish challenge. I thought it was a game. Something silly. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Zarnecki put her up to it,” I said. It was just an opinion formed out of prejudice. But I would have backed it with money.
“But why?” he said. “If your man doesn’t