Blish, James - Beep

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Beep

JOSEF PABER lowered his newspaper slightly. Finding the girl

on the park bench looking his way, he smiled the agonizingly

embarrassed smile of the thoroughly married nobody caught

bird-watching, and ducked back into the paper again.

He was reasonably certain that he looked the part of a

middle-aged, steadily employed, harmless citizen enjoying a

Sunday break in the bookkeeping and family routines. He

was also quite certain, despite his official instructions, that

it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference if he didn't.

These boy-meets-girl assignments always came off. Jo had

never tackled a single one that had required him.

As a matter of fact, the newspaper, which he was supposed

to be using only as a blind, interested him a good deal more

than his job did. He had only barely begun to suspect the

obvious ten years ago when the Service had snapped him

up; now, after a decade as an agent, he was still fascinated

to see how smoothly the really important situations came off.

The dangerous situationsnot boy-meets-girl.

This affair of the Black Horse Nebula, for instance. Some

days ago the papers and the commentators had begun to

mention reports of disturbances in that area, and Jo's

practiced eye had picked up the mention. Something big

was cooking.

Today it had boiled overthe Black Horse Nebula had

suddenly spewed ships by the hundreds, a massed armada

that must have taken more than a century of effort on the

part of a whole star cluster, a production drive conducted

in the strictest and most fanatical kind of secrecy. . . .

And, of course, the Service had been on the spot in plenty

of time. With three times as many ships, disposed with

mathematical precision so as to enfilade the entire armada

the moment it broke from the nebula. The battle had been

a massacre, the attack smashed before the average citizen

could even begin to figure out what it had been aimed at

and good had triumphed over evil once more.

Of course.

Furtive scuffings on the gravel drew his attention briefly.

He looked at his watch, which said 14:58:03. That was the

time, according to his instructions, when boy had to meet

girl.

He had been given the strictest kind of orders to let nothing

interfere with this meetingthe orders always issued on boy-

meets-girl assignments. But, as usual, he had nothing to do

but observe. The meeting was coming off on the dot, without

any prodding from Jo. They always did.

Of course.

With a sigh, he folded his newspaper, smiling again at the

coupleyes, it was the right man, tooand moved away, as

if reluctantly. He wondered what would happen were he to

pull away the false mustache, pitch the newspaper on the

grass, and bound away with a joyous whoop. He suspected

that the course of history would not be deflected by even a

second of arc, but he was not minded to try the experiment.

The park was pleasant. The twin suns warmed the path

and the greenery without any of the blasting heat which they

would bring to bear later in the summer. Randolph was

altogether the most comfortable planet he had visited in

years. A little backward, perhaps, but restful, too.

It was also slightly over a hundred light-years away from

Earth. It would be interesting to know how Service head-

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quarters on Earth could have known in advance that boy

would meet girl at a certain spot on Randolph, precisely

at 14:58:03.

Or how Service headquarters could have ambushed with

micrometric precision a major interstellar fleet, with no more

preparation than a few days' buildup in the newspapers and

video could evidence.

The press was free, on Randolph as everywhere. It reported

the news it got. Any emergency concentration of Service

ships in the Black Horse area, or anywhere else, would have

been noticed and reported on. The Service did not forbid

such reports for "security" reasons or for any other reasons.

Yet there had been nothing to report but that (a) an armada

of staggering size had erupted with no real warning from the

Black Horse Nebula, and that (b) the Service had been ready.

By now, it was a commonplace that the Service was always

ready. It had not had a defect or a failure in well over two

centuries. It had not even had a fiasco, the alarming-sounding

technical word by which it referred to the possibility that a

boy-meets-girl assignment might not come off.

Jo hailed a hopper. Once inside he stripped himself of the

mustache, the bald spot, the forehead creasesall the make-

up which had given him his mask of friendly innocuousness.

The hoppy watched the whole process in the rear-view

mirror. Jo glanced up and met his eyes.

"Pardon me, mister, but I figured you didn't care if I saw

you. You must be a Service man."

"That's right. Take me to Service HQ, will you?"

"Sure enough." The hoppy gunned his machine. It rose

smoothly to the express level. "First time I ever got close to

a Service man. Didn't hardly believe it at first when I saw

you taking your face off. You sure looked different."

"Have to, sometimes," Jo said, preoccupied.

"I'll bet. No wonder you know all about everything before

it breaks. You must have a thousand faces each, your own

mother wouldn't know you, eh? Don't you care if I know

about your snooping around in disguise?"

Jo grinned. The grin created a tiny pulling sensation across

one curve of his cheek, just next to his nose. He stripped

away the overlooked bit of tissue and examined it critically.

"Of course not. Disguise is an elementary part of Service

work. Anyone could guess that. We don't use it often, as a

matter of factonly on very simple assignments."

"Oh." The hoppy sounded slightly disappointed, as melo-

drama faded. He drove silently for about a minute. Then,

speculatively: "Sometimes I think the Service must have

time-travel, the things they pull. . . . Well, here you are.

Good luck, mister."

"Thanks."

Jo went directly to Krasna's office. Krasna was a

Randolpher. Earth-trained, and answerable to the Earth office,

but otherwise pretty much on his own. His heavy, muscular

face wore the same expression of serene confidence that was

characteristic of Service officials everywhereeven some

that, technically speaking, had no faces to wear it.

"Boy meets girl," Jo said briefly. "On the nose and on

the spot."

"Good work, Jo. Cigarette?" Krasna pushed the box across

his desk.

"Nope, not now. Like to talk to you, if you've got time."

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Krasna pushed a button, and a toadstoollike chair rose out

of the floor behind Jo. "What's on your mind?"

"Well," Jo said carefully. "I'm wondering why you patted

me on the back just now for not doing a job."

"You did a job."

"I did not," Jo said flatly. "Boy would have met girl,

whether I'd been here on Randolph or back on Earth, The

course of true love always runs smooth. It has in all my

boy-meets-girl cases, and it has in the boy-meets-girl cases

of every other agent with whom I've compared notes."

"Well, good," Krasna said, smiling. "That's the way we

like to have it run. And that's the way we expect it to run.

But, Jo, we like to have somebody on the spot, somebody

with a reputation for resourcefulness, just in case there's a

snag. There almost never is, as you've observed. Butif

there were?"

Jo snorted. "If what you're trying to do is to establish

preconditions for the future, any interference by a Service

agent would throw the eventual result farther off the track.

I know that much about probability."

"And what makes you think that we're trying to set up

the future?"

"It's obvious even to the hoppies on your own planet; the

one that brought me here told me he thought the Service had

time-travel. It's especially obvious to all the individuals and

governments and entire populations that the Service has

bailed out of serious messes for centuries, with never a single

failure." Jo shrugged. "A man can be asked to safeguard

only a small number of boy-meets-girl cases before he realizes,

as an agent, that what the Service is safeguarding is the

future children of those meetings. Ergothe Service knows

what those children are to be like, and has reason to want

their future existence guaranteed. What other conclusion is

possible?"

Krasna took out a cigarette and lit it deliberately; it was

obvious that he was using the maneuver to cloak his response.

"None," he admitted at last. "We have some foreknowl-

edge, of course. We couldn't have made our reputation with

espionage alone. But we have obvious other advantages:

genetics, for instance, and operations research, the theory of

games, the Dirac transmitterit's quite an arsenal, and of

course there's a good deal of prediction involved in all those

things."

"I see that," Jo said. He shifted in his chair, formulating

all he wanted to say. He changed his mind about the

cigarette and helped himself to one. "But these things don't

add up to infallibilityand that's a qualitative difference,

Kras. Take this affair of the Black Horse armada. The mo-

ment the armada appeared, we'll assume, Earth heard about

it by Dirac, and started to assemble a counteramiada. But

it takes finite time to bring together a concentration of ships

and men, even if your message system is instantaneous.

"The Service's counterarmada was already on hand. It had

been building there for so long and with so little fuss that

nobody even noticed it concentrating until a day or so before

the battle. Then planets in the area began to sit up and

take notice, and be uneasy about what was going to break.

But not very uneasy; the Service always winsthat's been

a statistical fact for centuries. Centuries, Kras. Good Lord,

it takes almost as long as that, in straight preparation, to

pull some of the tricks we've pulled! The Dirac gives us an

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Blish, James - Beep

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