Privately, Illya could understand both points of view. Publicly, Klaus had to establish in advance a valid reason for leaving Utopia after having been at the Park only a month and a half; his cover identity was too valuable to be broken easily. This nonexistent waiter had gotten some of their best agents into some of the best hotels in the world at times when security was getting very tight indeed.

It lacked twenty-five minutes of midnight when Illya returned to his room, tired and a little slowed down by a few sociable mugs of beer, but he had his other job to attend to. He plugged a complex unit about the size of a quart bottle into the wall socket above his writing table and keyed a set of frequencies. The small pilot light on top of the unit flickered yellow as the signal was sent, then shone red for two seconds as the high-speed squirt transmission was received, then green. Illya slipped the featherweight earphones behind his head, allowing the rubber tips to slide into his ears, and touched another button which allowed him to scan rapidly through the tape. Two seconds was short, even for the transmission speed the device used; Waverly didn't talk to himself and no guests had come to #35. Occasionally a clearing throat would activate the recording mechanism for a few seconds, or a door closing in the next room, but there was nothing worth listening to on the tape. Illya pushed a button for recycle, and then triggered the bug in Silverthorne's residence.

This transmission took ten seconds, and the tape took twenty minutes to scan for voices. Nearly to the end, but unspecified as to time, he heard one end of a conversation which brought him back to wakefulness.

It started with the telephone chime and Silverthorne's voice saying, "Yes, thank you... Hello, Sydney. I've got fifteen minutes. Using scrambler pattern three." There followed a few seconds of silence and sounds of plastic things clicking together, then, "Hello test, hello test... hello test, hello test... Ah. There you are. Now, what's the situation in Upolu?"

For a few minutes the tape contained only questions and commentary, most of it impossible to follow, with the long pauses clipped out by the voice-activating switch. Then Silverthorne went directly from a final comment into another subject.

"By the way, I hope you have a tape on this because I'm nearly out of time and won't be able to repeat. There's another guest here named Dodgson. Leon Dodgson." He spelled it. "I don't know what his line is, but he's got a tremendous capability for leadership, is quite widely educated and experienced in a number of fields. I think we could use a man like that, and I want a team of recruiters to meet him when he comes out. Here's his description..."

Illya's eyebrows rose slightly as he reached for the control that would allow him to replay that portion of the recording. He did so, and a wry smile crept across his face. Not likely that any other firm could woo Alexander Waverly from U.N.C.L.E., whatever they were willing to offer. But it would be interesting to see what happened when he was contacted, supposing that they could even find him.

There was no real evidence as to what Silverthorne's firm did—apparently they were large and wide-spread, occupied with import and export, sensitive to political situations all over the South Pacific area, and involved to some extent with scientific research of some kind touching on oceanography. It might be rewarding to look up Silverthorne when he got back to New York and see just what he did. Whatever it might be, the thought of Waverly being approached by representatives of a top executive search outfit was more than moderately amusing.

He filed that tape cartridge and plugged in another one, tapping his third bug in the Security Office. Nothing of interest there—he dozed off twice while routine matters flowed by, and as he disconnected the bug at last and fell into bed, he debated sleepily about removing the trick light bulb from Security. It might come in handy eventually, but there was conversation of some kind going on there every minute, and the time it took to audit the tape was worth more in sleep than anything he had learned from it. As he slipped down into slumber, his last thought was of Silverthorne.

"I think we could use a man like that," Illya quoted mentally, and smiled in the darkness.

Chapter 6

"Q ASSASSINATION."

THE MESSAGE was low priority and had been filed Saturday night, so it was Monday afternoon when the Sydney operator came to it in her stack of routine communications to Central. She signaled for access to Ident and tapped out the request.

1311670233 Z DE: SYDNEY TO: ULCOMP IDEREQ LEON DODGSON RESIDENT UTOPIA SOUTH AUSTRALIA. DESCOD 702-BBG-08-33692.

Five seconds later the message faded from her screen and she was preparing to code the next when the borders of the screen flashed red.

1311670234 Z UCR Q: VERIFY DESCOD LASCOM SYDNEY.

The red flicker meant top priority, and the UCR prefix meant the question was a direct readout from the Ultimate Computer itself, which rarely responded to routine messages with more than a curt acknowledgment. She searched for the tape of Silverthorne's last conversation, checked his description, re-coded it, and verified it. The red flicker cut off and the terse request was replaced by a line of neat block letters: THANK YOU.

She'd probably never know what was special about Dodgson; she didn't care. She touched the Clear button and punched in the next report.

In Freetown, Sierra Leone, a pretty colored girl in a neat gray uniform answered a flashing red light and saw a line of green type march across her viewscreen.

1311670235 Z UCR WAVERLY UNCLE 1/1 LOCATED PROBAB 74%. INFORM COUREP. Q: ACTION ADVISORY.

The operator was there for one reason: to introduce a flexible human element into what might otherwise become a mindless juggernaut of relentlessly irrational logic, basing everything on some piece of false or inaccurate data such as would inevitably pass into the vast memory banks. Her job was to fill gaps purposefully left in the chain of communication; in the present instance the Ultimate Computer had no way of knowing if the Council Representative was asleep, in conference, or didn't care, and her job was to decide whether he should be awakened at half past one in the morning.

She was aware of the Waverly situation; she tightened her lips and reached for a red telephone handset.

1311670241 Z UCR WAVERLY UNCLE 1/1 AT UTOPIA SOUTH AUSTRALIA NAME OF LEON DODGSON PROBAB 78%. Q: ASSASSINATION.

A short elderly man in flowered pajamas sat at a desk in a bare office. The walls were stained concrete, and looked as if they sweated. Acoustical panels stood on painted lines here and there about the room, cables snaked through covered troughs in the concrete floor, and the wide steel desk bore no telephone, no pen and pencil set, no blotter. A screen rose up from its center, a typewriter keyboard extended to the old man's elbow, and a single fat loose-leaf notebook, heavily tabbed, lay open just to his right. To his left stood a beaker of coffee and a half-filled cup.

The message stood on his screen in block letters, awaiting an answer with the patience of the machine. He studied it for several seconds, then turned to the typewriter keyboard. The screen faded as he touched a switch, and as he typed other letters appeared.

DE: COUREP LIST METHODS AND PROBAB SUCCESS.

1311670243 Z UCR Q: DATA UTOPIA. SCANNING FILES.

He had hardly time to read the answer before it vanished and was replaced by five lines.

LOW-YIELD THERMONUCLEAR WEAPON: 97%

HIGH-SPEED SATURATION SHELLING: 91%

INFECTION OF AREA: 42% - 90%

POISON WATER SUPPLY: 82% - 89%

ATTACK DEPARTING AIRPLANE: 62%